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The patient, or one of his relations, goes to a seer and brings the seer to his house, frankincense is burnt,…

Date of account
Second edition published 1896
Source
The Popular Religion and Folk-Lore of Northern India, Vol. 2 (of 2)
Reference
The Popular Religion and Folk-Lore of Northern India, Vol. 2 (of 2) · selected passage 56
Rights
public_domain
Language
English
Record updated
2026-08-25

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Record summary

The patient, or one of his relations, goes to a seer and brings the seer to his house, frankincense is burnt, and the sick man's spirit comes into the seer's body

Published source text

Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.

Source passage

Source text · mention only

The patient, or one of his relations, goes to a seer and brings the seer to his house, frankincense is burnt, and the sick man's spirit comes into the seer's body. The people ask the spirit in the seer why the man is sick. He says, 'The ghost of the man you killed has come back, and is troubling you.' Then they say, 'What is to be done?' The spirit says, 'Put him in a place in his or in your land.' The people say, 'How can we put him?' The spirit says, 'Take a cock, five cocoanuts, rice, and red lead, and fill a bamboo basket with them next Sunday evening, and by waving the basket round the head of the patient, take the ghost out of the patient.' When Sunday afternoon comes they call the exorcist. If the ghost has not haunted the sick man for a week, it is held that the man was worried by that ghost, who is now content with the proposed arrangement.

Historical context

Contextual commentary · mention only

This material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.

Modern context

Contextual commentary · mention only

Lattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.

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