456 Professor James George Frazer [Feb. 5, 



respect for marriage, and has thereby contributed to a stricter 

 observance of the rules of sexual morality both among the married 

 and the unmarried. That this is true will appear, I think, from the 

 following examples. 



Among the Karens of Burma " adultery or fornication is sup- 

 posed to have a powerful influence to injure the crops. Hence, if 

 there have been bad crops in a village for a year or two, and the rains 

 fail, the cause is attributed to sins of this character ; and they say 

 the God of Heaven and earth is angry with them on this account, and 

 all the villagers unite in making an offering to appease Him." And 

 when a case of adultery or fornication has come to light, " the elders 

 decide that the transgressors must buy a hog and kill it. Then the 

 woman takes one foot of the hog, and the man takes another, and 

 they scrape out furrows in the ground with each foot, which they fill 

 with the blood of the hog. They next scratch the ground with their 

 hands and pray : ' God of heaven and earth, God of the mountains 

 and hills, I have destroyed the productiveness of the country. Do 

 not be angry with me. Now I repair the mountains, now I heal the 

 hills, and the streams and the lands. May there be no failure of 

 crops . . . Make Thy paddy fruitful, Thy rice abundant. Make the 

 vegetables to flourish. . .' After each has prayed thus, they return 

 to the house and say they have repaired the earth." Thus, according 

 to the Karens, adultery and fornication are not simply moral offences 

 which concern only the culprits and their families ; they physically 

 affect the course of nature by blighting the fruits of the earth and 

 destroying its fertility. Hence they are public crimes which threaten 

 the existence of the whole community by cutting off its food 

 supply at the root. But the physical injury which these offences 

 do to the soil can be physically repaired by saturating it with pig's 

 blood. 



Again, the inhabitants of the hills near Rajamahal, in Bengal, 

 imagine that adultery undetected and unexpiated causes the inhabi- 

 tants of the village to be visited by a plague or destroyed by tigers or 

 other ravenous beasts. To prevent these evils an adulteress generally 

 makes a clean breast. Her paramour has then to furnish a hog, and 

 he and she are sprinkled with its blood, which is supposed to wash 

 away their sin and avert the Divine ^vrath. When a village suffers 

 from plague or the ravages of wild beasts, the people religiously 

 believe that the calamity is a punishment for secret immorality, and 

 they resort to a curious form of divination to discover the culprits, in 

 order that the crime may be duly expiated. 



The Khasis of x^ssam are divided into a number of clans which are 

 exogamous, that is, no man may marry a woman of his own clan. 

 Should a man cohabit with a woman of his own clan, it is treated as 

 incest, and is believed to cause great disasters : the people will be 

 struck with lightning or killed by tigers, the women will die in child- 

 bed, and so forth. The guilty couple is taken to a priest and obliged 



