curse.​[951] Perhaps the bitter language was supposed to strengthen the bitter taste, and hence the medicinal virtue, of these plants. At Lindus in the island of Rhodes it was customary to sacrifice one or two plough oxen to Hercules with curses and imprecations; indeed we are told that the sacrifice was deemed invalid if a good word fell from any one’s lips during the rite. The custom was explained by a legend that Hercules had laid hands on the oxen of a ploughman and cooked and devoured them, while their owner, unable to defend his beasts, stood afar off and vented his anger in a torrent of abuse and execration. Hercules received his maledictions with a roar of laughter, appointed him his priest, and bade him always sacrifice with the very same execrations, for he had never {p282} dined better in his life.​[952] The legend is plainly a fiction devised to explain the ritual. We may conjecture that the curses were intended to palliate the slaughter of a sacred animal. The subject will be touched on in a later part of this work. Here we must return to rain-making. [Sidenote: Rain-making by ploughing.] Women are sometimes supposed to be able to make rain by ploughing, or pretending to plough. Thus the Pshaws and Chewsurs of the Caucasus have a ceremony called “ploughing the rain,” which they observe in time of drought. Girls yoke themselves to a plough and drag it into a river, wading in the water up to their girdles.​[953] In the same circumstances Armenian girls and women do the same. The oldest woman, or the priest’s wife, wears the priest’s dress, while the others, dressed as men, drag the plough through the water against the stream.​[954] In the Caucasian province of Georgia, when a drought has lasted long, marriageable girls are yoked in couples with an ox-yoke on their shoulders, a priest holds the reins, and thus harnessed they wade through rivers, puddles, and marshes, praying, screaming, weeping, and laughing.​[955] In a district of Transylvania, when the ground is parched with drought, some girls strip themselves naked, and, led by an older woman, who is also naked, they steal a harrow and carry it across the fields to a brook, where they set it afloat. Next they sit on the harrow and keep a tiny flame burning on each corner of it for an hour. Then they leave the harrow in the water and go home.​[956] A similar rain-charm is resorted to in some parts of India; naked women drag a plough across a field by night, while the men keep carefully out of the way, for their presence would break the spell.​[957] As performed at {p283} Chunar in Bengal on the twenty-fourth of July 1891 the ceremony was this. Between nine and ten in the evening a barber’s wife went from door to door and invited the women to engage in ploughing. They all assembled in a field from which men were excluded. Three women of a husbandman’s family then stripped themselves naked; two of them were yoked like oxen to the plough, while the third held the handle.