Note 16 — Chapter V · WORSHIP OF THE MALEVOLENT DEAD.

The same theory that the head is an entry for spirits accounts for numerous strange practices. Thus, when in Kumaun a man is bitten by a snake they pull three hairs from his scalp-lock and strike him three times on the top of the head with the first joint of the middle finger, a kind of blow which in ordinary cases is regarded with the utmost terror. So when a person has fever, they take a bone and fill it with grain, and, making the patient stand in the sun, dig a hole where the shadow of his head falls, and there bury the bone, saying, “Fever! Begone with the bone!”16 At a Gond wedding, the old man who officiates knocks the heads of the bride and bridegroom together to scare the evil spirits,17 and at a Hindu marriage in Northern India the mother of the youth, as he leaves to fetch his bride, and as he returns with her, waves lamps, a brass tray, grain, and a rice pounder, to drive off the Bhûts fluttering round his head. It is on the same principle that the bridegroom wears a marriage crown, and this also accounts for many of the customs of blessing by the laying on of hands and anointing which prevail all over the world. In the same way the hair has always been regarded as a spirit entry. Magistrates in Northern India are often troubled by people who announce their intention of “letting their hair grow” at some one whom they desire to injure. This, if one can judge by the manifest terror exhibited by the person against whom this rite is directed, must be a very stringent form of coercion. For the same reason ascetics wear the hair loose and keep it uncut, as Sampson did, and the same idea probably accounts for the rites of ceremonial shaving of youths, and of the mourners after death.