Note 3 — RELIGION

Sityingo is regarded as the lord of wild animals, which he keeps just as men keep pigs and cattle. Sometimes he can be heard calling the wild pig, but to hear him is very unlucky. He lives in the jungle and is like a small man, with his head twisted to one side. By his favour men have luck in hunting. Okisityingo (“house-sityingo”) is the good genius of the house. He is like a man, but has enormously long fingers and is spotted all over. He is only seen by men in delirium. So long as he is in a good temper his influence is good, but he can be harmful if due respect is not shown him. It is very unlucky if he leaves the house. Ngazo is another jungle spirit, practically identical with Sityingo. To every village and every man is attached a Rangsi, by whose favour the crops are good. No one has ever seen one or knows what one is like to look at. Just as crops and wild game have their genii, so have the rivers and streams in Tchhüpfu (“water-master”3), a being like a man with hair of enormous length, who lives at the bottom of deep pools and uses human skulls as hearth-stones. Small offerings are made to him by some villages after doing the oyantsoa ceremony. One is believed to inhabit a pool called Tchhüpfu izzü in the Doyang below Morakcho. In the days when men first came out of the earth they were persecuted by a fiend called Khyuham, who ate their children and carried the skulls of his victims about in a basket on his back. Rankhanda, one of the ancestors of the Lhota tribe, managed to shut him up in a hole in the earth, the entrance of which he blocked, some say with a stone, others with a mithan horn. Yet even now a yearly ceremony called Epuetha is performed by every family in order to ward off the evil influence of Khyuham. Almost every illness is put down to the unhallowed attentions of Tsandhramo, invisible fiends who out of sheer malice make men sick by detaining their souls or by introducing hair or bits of wood or small stones into their bodies, making it necessary to call in a ratsen to extract them. The bright rust-coloured mud which is often seen oozing out of cliffs is regarded as the excreta of Tsandhramo. If these patches are sprinkled with dogs’ teeth the fiends will abandon the place. In Lakhuti the custom obtains of leaving a spear sticking through the roof of a house from inside when an inmate is ill. This is supposed to ward off further attacks of evil spirits. During the influenza outbreak of 1918 the village simply bristled with spears. The jungle is believed to be haunted by wailing fiends called Nangkamo. A famous haunt is below the village of Akuk on the northern slope of the range. Men are tempted to follow the wailing. If they do they will be affected with such madness that they will think level ground is steep ground, and steep ground level ground.4 Ramphan, the great Lhota hero, once speared one of these fiends with a red-hot spear, and buried it. In the morning he dug it up and found that though when speared it had the appearance of a man it was now a lizard.5