Note 135.1 — PSYCHE’S TASK

Precautions taken in Burma against the ghosts of women who die in pregnancy or childbed. Among the Shans of Burma, when a woman dies with an unborn child, it is believed that her spirit turns into a malignant ghost, “who may return to haunt her husband’s home and torment him, unless precautions are taken to keep her away. To begin with, her unborn child is removed by an operation; then mother and child are wrapped in separate mats and buried without coffins. If this be not done, the same misfortune may occur again to the woman, in her future life, and the widower will suffer from the attacks of the ghost. When the bodies are being removed from the house, part of the mat wall in the side of the house is taken down, and the dead woman and her baby are lowered to the ground through the aperture. The hole through which the bodies have passed is immediately filled with new mats, so that the ghost may not know how to return.”135.1 The Kachins of Burma are so afraid of the ghosts of women dying in childbed that no sooner has such a death taken place than the husband, the children, and almost all the people in the house take to flight lest the ghost should bite them. They bandage the eyes of the dead woman with her own hair to prevent her from seeing anything; they wrap the corpse in a mat and carry it out of the house not by the ordinary door, but by an opening made for the purpose either in the wall or in the floor of the room where she breathed her last. Then they convey the body to a deep ravine where foot of man seldom penetrates, and there, having heaped her clothes, her jewellery, and all her belongings over her, they set fire to the pile and reduce the whole to ashes. “Thus they destroy all the property of the unfortunate woman in order that her soul may not think of coming to fetch it afterwards and to bite the people in the attempt.” When this has been done, the officiating priest scatters some burnt grain of a climbing plant (shămien), inserts in the earth the pestle which the dead woman used to husk the rice, and winds up the exorcism by cursing and railing at her ghost, saying: “Wait to come back to us till this grain sprouts and this pestle blossoms, till the fern bears fruit, and the cocks lay eggs.” The house in which the woman died is generally pulled down, and the timber may only be used as firewood or to build small hovels in the fields. Till a new house can be built for them, the widower and the orphans receive the hospitality of their nearest relatives, a father or a brother; their other friends would not dare to receive them from fear of the ghost. Occasionally the dead mother’s jewels are spared from the fire and given away to some poor old crones, who do not trouble their heads about ghosts. If the medicine-man who attended the woman in life and officiated at the funeral is old, he may consent to accept the jewels as the fee for his services; but in that case no sooner has he got home than he puts the jewels in the henhouse. If the hens remain quiet, it is a good omen and he can keep the trinkets with an easy mind; but if the fowl flutter and cackle, it is a sign that the ghost is sticking to the jewels, and in a fright he restores them to the family. The old man or old woman into whose hands the trinkets of the dead woman thus sometimes fall cannot dispose of them to other members of the tribe; for nobody who knows where the things come from would be so rash as to buy them. However, they may find purchasers among the Shans or the Chinese, who do not fear Kachin ghosts.136.1