The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 09 of 12)Frazer, James George
Religion
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 09 of 12)
Frazer, James George
Magic; Mythology; Religion; Superstition
struggle.(433) That in such contests, resembling our English game of
“French and English” or the “Tug of War,” the one side may represent
demons is proved by a custom observed by the Chukmas, a tribe of the
Chittagong Hill Tracts in South-Eastern India. “On the death of a Dewan or
of a priest a curious sport is customary at the funeral. The corpse is
conveyed to the place of cremation on a car; to this car ropes are
attached, and the persons attending the ceremony are divided into two
equal bodies and set to work to pull in opposite directions. One side
represents the good spirits; the other, the powers of evil. The contest is
so arranged that the former are victorious. Sometimes, however, the young
men representing the demons are inclined to pull too vigorously, but a
stick generally quells this unseemly ardour in the cause of evil.”(434)
The contest is like that between the angels and devils depicted in the
frescoes of the Campo Santo at Pisa. In Burma a similar struggle takes
place at the funeral of a Buddhist monk who passed for a saint in the
popular estimation: ropes are attached to opposite ends of the car on
which the coffin is placed, all the able-bodied men of the neighbourhood
hold on to one or other of the two ends and pull as if for dear life
against each other; even the women and girls sometimes join in the tug of
war, and policemen have been seen, in a state of frantic excitement,
waving their batons to encourage the combatants and dragging back shirkers
by main force into the fighting line. The struggle is sometimes prolonged
for hours or even days.(435) With the example of the Chukmas before us, we
may conjecture that the original motive of this internecine strife was a
persuasion that the eternal happiness or misery of the departed saint
depended on the issue of this contest between the powers of good and evil
for the possession of his mortal remains.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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