LEOPAKD MEN HUTTON. 531 



when the children of that neighborhood are peevish it is customary, 

 they say, to dip a blade of thatching-grass into the spring and give 

 it to the child to suck. It stops his wailings, but he grows up a were- 

 tiger. The Angami, however, does not practice lycanthropy him- 

 self, and the only Angami villages in which persons who do practice 

 it are found are those on the borders of the Sema country, where a 

 large part of the population is Sema by origin. The Sema is an in- 

 veterate lycanthropist, and it is in that tribe that specific examples 

 are the easiest to come by. 



Both the Angami and Sema agree in holding that there is no actual 

 transformation of the body of the lycanthropist into a leopard. 

 What he seems to do is to project his soul into a particular animal, 

 with which his human body also thus becomes very intimately asso- 

 ciated. A leopard which is thus the recipient (from time to time) 

 of a human soul may be recognized by having five claws on each foot, 

 and is called by the Angami mavi (which might mean " real man ") 

 and by the Semas angshu amiki, an expression to which I will refer 

 again. I have myself seen a leopard with dew-claws (making five 

 instead of the usual four) killed in a Rengma village, and at once 

 asserted to be the recipient of a lycanthropist's projected soul. Inci- 

 dentally I have seen and followed in the soft bed of the Dayang 

 River the tracks of a freak tiger which had apparently five toes on 

 its forefeet. 



The lycanthropic spring, in which the Angami believe, is sometimes 

 said to be situated in the Sema country, but the Semas give an en- 

 tirely different account of the way in which they acquire the lycan- 

 thropic habit. 



The theory and symptoms are clear and recognizable, and differ 

 perhaps from most lycanthropists in other parts of the world. The 

 Sema undergoes no physical transformation whatever. The " pos- 

 session," if we may term it so, is not ordinarily induced by any ex- 

 ternal aid, but comes on at the bidding of spirits which may not be 

 gainsaid, and under whose influence the man possessed entirely loses 

 his own volition in the matter. The faculty can, however, be ac- 

 quired by very close and intimate association with some lycanthrop- 

 ist, sleeping in the same bed with him, eating from the same dish 

 with him, and never leaving his side for a considerable period — two 

 months is said to be the shortest time in which the faculty can be 

 acquired in this way. It can also be acquired, according to some, by 

 being fed by a lycanthropist with chicken-flesh and ginger, which 

 is given in successive collections of six, five, and three pieces of each 

 together on crossed pieces of plantain leaf. It is dangerous, too, to 

 eat food or drink that a lycanthropist has left unfinished, as the 

 habit may thus be unwittingly acquired. The animal whose body 



