The following article may not inappropriately follow mine on "Legion." I cannot tell whether the things related are true, but the narration will serve to show what the immutables of the East believe concerning the "possession of devils." The demonised of our Lord’s time may have been similarly affected.

"The superstitious fears which in Europe make the heart beat, the limbs tremble, the cheeks grow pale, the brow bead with perspiration, the hair rise upon the head, are almost wholly unknown in India. The Hindoo, old or young, is not haunted by the vague, undefinable terror which makes the children of the English strangers hide their heads under the bed-clothes. He knows very well what he dreads; and that is neither sights nor sounds abhorrent to nature, but substantial and tangible inflictions—such as a sound drubbing. Colonel Sleeman tells of villages that are absolutely persecuted by the spirits of their old proprietors; and a native friend of his informed him that in such cases he always considered it his bounden duty to his tenants to build a neat little shrine to the ghost, and have it well endowed and attended. Some go still further to propitiate the defunct proprietor: they have made leases out in his name. The English authorities were much puzzled by this whim. On one occasion Mr. Fraser, who managed the settlement of the land-revenue of the Sanger district for twenty years, had drawn a renewal of the lease according to his own ideas, in the name of the head of the family; but this threw the party concerned into great consternation. He assured him that the spirit of the ancient proprietor was still dominant in the village; that all affairs of importance were transacted in his name; and that if the living estate-holder appeared in the lease otherwise than as the manager or bailiff of the dead one, the consequence would be the destruction of him and his.

"There is, of course, no want of coincidental circumstances to confirm this belief. When Colonel Sleeman himself was in charge of a district in the Valley of the Nerbudda, a village cultivator came into disastrous collision with the spirit of the next village. This spirit was of so violent a temper that the lands hardly fetched any thing, so difficult was it to find anybody bold enough to risk his displeasure. Nevertheless, the cultivator in question, when ploughing one day at the border of the two estates, was so foolhardy as to drive his plough a few yards beyond his own boundary, and thus add to his own about half an acre of the deserted land. That very night, we are told, his only son was bitten by a snake, and his two bullocks were seized with the murrain! The smitten sinner at once rushed to the village temple, confessed his crime, and promised not only to restore the stolen land, but to build a handsome shrine upon the spot to its true proprietor. The ghost was appeased: the boy and the bullocks recovered. The shrine was built, and is the boundary-mark to this day. At another time this same spirit was so tyrannical, with his whip literally of serpents, that the estate fell into a waste, although the soil was the best in the district. At length, the governor, determined to shame the people out of their prejudices, took the lease himself, at the rent of one thousand rupees a year, and at the head of a procession of twelve ploughs, proceeded from his own residence, a dozen miles off, to superintend personally the commencement of proceedings at the perilous spot. Here Goroba Pundit—for that was his name—paused on the top of a gentle hill, crowned with a great and beautiful banyan tree, the lands that had become his swelling in their neglected luxuriance around him. His attendants spread a carpet for him under that fine tree, and alighting from his horse, he sat down to preface operations by indulging himself with his hookah, and moralising the while on the superstitions of men, as unsubstantial as the fragrant smoke that floated around and above him. ‘So beautiful an estate!’ thought he; ‘so noble a tree!’ and he raised his eyes and looked through the smoke at a branch of the banyan tree hanging like a canopy over his head, close almost to touching. On that branch there was coiled an enormous black snake! Goroba Pundit looked into the glittering eyes of the reptile without being able to move! But presently desperation gave him strength to break the enchantment. He started to his feet; sprang with one bound upon his horse; galloped madly down the hill; and never drew bridle till he reached home. Although afterwards in office as a native collector, nothing could induce him to revisit the beautiful estate, even after it had passed into other hands; but he was sometimes heard to execrate his folly in having neglected to propitiate, before taking possession, that awful spirit which had glared down upon him from the tree.

"It might be supposed that ‘christened men’ are exempt from the interference of these pagan ghosts; but this is by no means the case. Mr. Lindsay, while in charge of the same district, made another attempt to overcome the prejudice of the people respecting this fine property. The lands had never been measured; and he was assured by the revenue-officers, as well as the farmers and cultivators of the neighbourhood, that the spirit of the old proprietor would never permit such a liberty to be taken with it. Mr. Lindsay, however, was a practised surveyor, and he saw no difficulty in the case. To avoid accidents, which he knew would have a bad effect on such an occasion, he caused a new measuring-cord to be made on purpose for the adventure; and so provided, he entered the first field, his officers following in alarm and expectation. The rope was applied—and what followed? If the men of the village are to be believed, who related the circumstance some years after, it flew into a thousand pieces the moment it was stretched. At all events, it broke—that fact is certain; and Mr. Lindsay was taken ill the same morning, returned to Nursingpore, and soon after died of fever.

"This superstition is not confined to the part of the country now alluded to; but in other quarters it receives different modifications. On the Malabar coast, every field of corn, every fruit tree, is confined to the care of some spirit or other, by being dedicated to him; and from that moment the preternatural guardian feels himself responsible for the safety of the property, and punishes the smallest theft either with illness or death. One day a man rushed up to the proprietor of a jack tree, threw himself on the ground before him, embraced his feet, and piteously implored his mercy.

"’What is the matter?’ asked the proprietor, in surprise. ‘What do you apprehend from me?’ ‘I was tempted,’ replied the man, ‘as I passed by at night, and took a jack from your tree. This was three days ago; and ever since I have been suffering unspeakable agony in my stomach. The spirit of the tree is upon me, and you alone can appease him.’ In England, we should probably have thought, ‘the fruit was doubtless unripe;’ but in India they reason as well as act differently. The proprietor picked up from the ground a bit of cow-dung, moistened it, made a mark with it in the name of the spirit upon the forehead of the penitent, and then put the remainder into the knot of hair on the top of his head. The thing was done; the man’s pains left him instantly, and he went off, vowing to take good care never again to offend a guardian spirit.

"The devils of India are quite as practical personages as the ghosts; and sometimes, indeed, it is difficult to distinguish between them. When there is no vested interest in the grave to refer the infliction to, it is tolerably safe for the victim to believe that his sufferings proceed from a devil. In like manner, when Hindoo science is at fault as to the natural origin of some disease, the doctor sees very clearly that it must have a preternatural one. Thus, in epileptic and other fits, and more especially in some obscure diseases, such as those of the liver and spleen, to which children are subject, the devils always get the blame. In Dr. Wiseman’s curious and instructive Commentary on Ancient Hindoo Medicine, he gives a complete account of the doings of these anti-doctors, with a description of the treatment resorted to for casting them out. This treatment, in the present day, consists, in great part, of prayers and incantations; and when a cure is effected, it is set down as owing to the preternatural power of the doctors. The inconvenience of this is, that a man who has it in his power to cure is supposed likewise to have the power to kill; and when the death of the patient takes place, it is not unfrequently regarded as a murder. Numerous instances have occurred of medical practitioners, on this consummation occurring, being put to death by the incensed relations; and several are on record in which a father has stood over the doctor with a drawn sword by the bedside of his child, and cut him down the instant the patient died.

"It frequently happens, that in India, as well as in other countries, the devils do not act independently, but under the direction of some human being who has contrived to get one of them under control. Such human beings are of the female sex, and of that mature age at which they receive from the impolite the disrespectful name of elderly or old women. There is this difference, however, between the belief of the East and that of the West: in the West, it was the spirit who bribed the woman with his services; while in the East, it is the woman who bribes the spirit with hers. She ministers to him by means of sacrifices, and pampers his unclean taste with livers of human beings. She makes no scruple of digging young children out of their graves, and bringing them to life with the assistance of the expectant gourmand, so that the latter may feast on the part he covets.

"The power thus acquired does not seem to be exercised on objects as important as one might suppose from these shocking preliminaries. Colonel Sleeman mentions the case of a trooper in the employment of Major Wardlaw, when the latter was in charge of the Seonee district. The fellow went to an old woman for some milk for his master’s breakfast, and supposing her to be without any resource against his tyranny, carried it away without paying—intending, no doubt, to charge the major for it all the same. Before Major Wardlaw, however, had finished his breakfast, the dishonest trooper was down upon his back, writhing and yelling in an agony of internal pain. It was quite clear that the man was bedevilled, and that the old woman was the sorceress. She was immediately apprehended, brought to where her victim lay, and commanded to cure him. The old woman denied her guilt, but admitted that some of her household gods, without her knowledge, might have thought fit to punish the dishonesty. This would not do. The bystanders would take no denial; and on their compulsion, she set about collecting materials for the poojah, (worship.) This being effected, she began the ceremonial, and before she had proceeded very far, the object was attained—the man was cured. ‘Had we not been resolute with her,’ says an eye-witness, ‘he must have died before the evening, so violent were his torments.’

"It is fortunate that the power of these sorceresses is confined as regards space; that is to say, if a man who has offended one of them escapes to a distance of ten or twelve miles, she is unable to harm him. A respectable native merchant having visited Ruttunpore, on business, was one day walking through the market-place, eating a piece of sugar-cane. He was so much abstracted in this pleasing employment, that he jostled unintentionally an old woman as he passed. Looking back with the intention of apologising, he heard her mutter something, and straightway he became uneasy—for he was a man who knew a thing or two. He forced himself, however, to resume his occupation as if nothing had happened; but when raising the sugar-cane to his lips—although hardly a minute had elapsed—he saw that the juice had all turned to blood! The terrified merchant immediately collected his followers, left his agents to settle his accounts as they might, and was beyond the bounds of the sorceress’ jurisdiction before dark. ‘Had I remained,’ said he, when relating the circumstance, ‘nothing could have saved me; I should have been a dead man before morning.’

"This conversion of the sugar-cane to blood is not uncommon; but sometimes it is attended with more terrifying circumstances. At a fair held in the town of Raepore, there were two women, apparently not much more than of middle age, tempting the passers-by with some remarkably fine sugar-canes. A grave and reverend seigneur, who afterwards related the adventure, observed them. This gentleman, be it observed in passing, was the representative of a native prince, the Shahgur Rajah, and described in perfect good faith what passed before his eyes. While looking at the women with the sugar-canes, there came up to them a stranger like himself, who wanted to purchase. The price demanded, however, was exorbitant, and the man became angry, thinking they were trying to take advantage of what they supposed to be his ignorance. He took up one of the canes; the women seized the other end, and a struggle ensued. The purchaser offered a fair price; the seller demanded double; and the crowd which had collected taking part on one side or other, a considerable quantity of the usual abuse was lavished on the female relations of each other. While this scene was going on, and the cane still grasped between the principals, a sipahee of the governor came up, armed to the teeth, and in a very imperious tone commanded the intending purchaser to let go. He refused, and old Junghar Khan, the relater of the story, who had by this time become much interested, told the soldier that if he so unreasonably took the part of the women, they—the bystanders—would befriend the man and see fair play. Upon this the functionary, without further ceremony, drew his sword and severed the cane through the middle.

"’There,’ said he, ‘you see the cause of my interference;’ and sure enough the horrified crowd observed a stream of blood running from the two ends of the cane, and forming a pool upon the ground! Whence came the blood? It had deserted the body of the would-be purchaser; the sorceress had drawn the stream of life through the cane, to gratify the foul-feeding devil to whom she owed her power; and the poor man fainted from exhaustion, and fell to the ground. So little blood was left in him, that he was unable to walk for ten days. So flagrant a case, occurring in the presence of a man so high in rank as the khan, could not be allowed to pass. The bystanders went in a body to the governor of the town to demand justice, declaring that, unless an example was made of the sorceresses, the fair, at which it was seen that no stranger’s life was safe, would be deserted. The women were accordingly sewn up in sacks and thrown into the river. But he whose appetite they had so lately ministered to, stood their friend, and they would not sink. The governor, it was thought, ought to have put them to death in some other way; but he did not relish having any thing to do with such customers; in fact, he was afraid to meddle further, and ordering them to be released from the sacks, allowed them to go about their business.

"The victim of such sorceries—or, as the sceptics of Europe will say, of his own imagination—does not always escape with a fainting-fit and a ten days’ illness. When Mr. Fraser was in charge of the Jubbulpore district, he sent one of his chuprassies to Mundlah one day, with a message on some official business. In the course of this expedition, the man, who was as tyrannical and rapacious as the rest of his class, bargained with an old woman for a cock she had to sell, and carried off his acquisition without performing his share of the contract. In due time he became hungry; and on arriving at a fitting place, he sat down under a tree to enjoy at his leisure the dinner he had so thoughtfully provided. Kindling a fire, he broiled the cock very nicely—first one part, then another and another, till he had devoured the whole animal. After making so egregious a meal, he doubtless sat for a time full of a vague sense of happiness, and felicitating himself dreamily on the cleverness with which he had obtained so cheap and excellent a dinner. But here he reckoned without his hostess. He had no sooner renewed his homeward journey than he felt some compunctious visitings within; and they increased as he proceeded, till he thought the cock had become alive again in his internals. By the time he reached home he was shrieking with agony and throwing himself upon the floor: he had every appearance of being at the point of death. In such circumstances, a man stands upon no punctilious with himself. He related every thing that had taken place; and it became only too clear that he was suffering from the vengeance of a sorceress.

"Is it possible that some of the Europeans present—for the room was soon crowded with spectators of all sorts—may have hinted at the illness being probably an indigestion, occasioned by his gluttony. But if so, the idle notion was dispelled in a very remarkable manner; for there was speedily heard a half-articulate sound which would have made the lank hair of the Hindoos—if such a thing had been possible—stand upright with terror. It was the crow of a cock—and in the same room. All listened breathlessly, striving to believe that what they had heard was an illusion; but out it came again, a regular barn-yard chant—a distinct and indisputable "Cooki-lilli-la-a-a-w!" Whence did it proceed? Is it in the air or the earth? All looked at one another as if with suspicion. But a third chant removed every particular of doubt from their minds. The cock was crowing in the man’s belly! As the groans of the dying wretch grew fainter, the note of unearthly triumph swelled the fuller: till at length death put an end to his sufferings, and to the crow of the phantom cock.

"Such are the ghosts and witches of India; and they present, it will be seen, some remarkable contrasts with those of Europe. Here we consider it sufficient punishment for any reasonable crime, to be haunted, as we call it, by a spirit; and even the innocent frequently spend a considerable part of their lives in a vague dread of this visitation. The Hindoo, on the other hand, has no notion of a spirit at all, but a something that will bite, or poison, or cudgel him, or bring illness or death among his family or cattle. The witches of Europe were accustomed to sell their souls for a modicum of transitory power; while those of India propitiate the Devil by sacrifices, and his services with blood-offerings. But in one thing the two systems of superstition are alike—it would be hard to say whether in the East or the West the imagination plays the more extraordinary and extravagant part."—From Harpers’ Magazine.

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