FABLE AND FOLKLORE 15 



welfare of the family. This is real ancestor-worship ex- 

 pressed in birds ; and Spence 12 records that "the shamans 

 of certain tribes of Paraguay act as go-betweens between 

 the members of their tribes and such birds as they imagine 

 enshrine the souls of their departed relatives." The 

 heathen Lombards ornamented their grave-posts with 

 the effigy of a dove. This notion of birds as reincarnated 

 human souls is not confined to untutored minds nor to 

 an ancient period. Evidences of its hold on the human 

 imagination may be found in Europe down to the present 

 day, and it animates one of the most picturesque super- 

 stitions of pious followers of Mahomet, two forms of 

 which have come to me. The first is given by Doughty, 13 

 the second by Keane, 14 both excellent authorities. 



Doughty says: "It was an ancient opinion of the 

 idolatrous Arabs that the departing spirit flitted from 

 man's brainpan as a wandering fowl, complaining thence- 

 forward in perpetual thirst her unavenged wrong; 

 friends, therefore, to avenge the friend's soul-bird, poured 

 upon the grave their pious libations of wine. The bird 

 is called a 'green fowl.' " 



Quoting Keane: "It is a superstition among the Mo- 

 hammedans that the spirits of martyrs are lodged in the 

 crops of green birds, and partake of the fruit and drink 

 of the rivers of paradise; also that the souls of the good 

 dwell in the form of white birds near the throne of God." 



But the spirits represented in birds are not always 

 ancestral or benevolent: they may be unpleasant, fore- 

 boding, demoniac. The Indians and negroes along the 

 Amazons will not destroy goatsuckers. Why? Because 

 they are receptacles for departed human souls who have 

 come back to earth unable to rest because of crimes done 

 in their former bodies, or to haunt cruel and hard-hearted 



