CHINESE FOLKLOEE AND SOME WESTERN ANALOGIES. 595 



in C'anton with some ostentation weighs the tiny boy who has just 

 arrived to cheer his parents after the loss of their tirsthorn— the hope 

 beino- that the waiting- god may pass him by because of his insignifi- 

 cance. A mother in England had three daughters in suc(^ession named 

 Helen, and all died. When a near neighbor, whose second daughter, 

 called Marian because she resembled her dead sister of that name, fell 

 dangerously ill, remembered the fate of the other family and substi- 

 tuted Maude for Marian, the girl recovered and few doubted that the 

 timely ta})u had removed the spell. Is there much difference between 

 the pagan and the Christian episode^ 



The horrid sprite who feeds chiefly upon infants of tender years is 

 a female ogre, called in Canton Sam-ku-lok-po. She bears a strong 

 affinity to the Lilith of Rabbinical legends — that earthborn first spouse 

 of father Adam, who was turned into a demon that has vexed his prog- 

 eny ever since the fall — herself merely a later Semitic version of the 

 proto Babylonian Lillal and Kiel-lillal, male and female devils of the 

 night. She it is who enters the children when they have long crjang 

 spells or when their souls are wandering {as souls will always wander) 

 in sleep. The changeling thus engendered must be promptly dealt 

 with or all is lost and the child grows up an idiot. An ink of dried 

 banana-peel ash and water should be made and a cross marked on the 

 baby's forehead the next time he is asleep. Then when Sam-ku-lok-po 

 swoops down again on obscene wing she will fail to recognize her 

 victim and the little soul can creep back once more.^ This is a less 

 off'ensivo mummery than the Irish test of putting the suspected change- 

 ling on a shovel and holding him over a muck heap. But what shall 

 we say of the sign of the cross in Chinese folk-cult; is it accident or 

 survival '( 



While considering this phase of our subject we are irresistably led 

 to the matter of demonology and witchcraft, without some regard for 

 which no discussion of folk-lore would be complete. The air of the 

 Eastern world is peopled, as everyone knows, with jinns and spirits 

 both good and evil, while in China reliable accounts of their confed- 

 erates and interpreters, the wizards, go back at least as far as thirteen 

 centuries before Christ. The conmiunication of human beings with 

 these powers is not looked upon there with the sort of horror it has 

 always inspired in the West. The uneducated look with some 

 qualms upon those versed in the magic arts, while the lettered sneer 

 at their pretensions, but there is no notion on the part of either 

 element of society to prohibit or persecute. In ancient days the office 

 of wizard in chief, the efficient agent of all the occult powers 

 that mioht injure or influence the realm, was as considera])le an 

 appointment at the court of China as of Persia. The love of genu 

 in the East resembles so closely that in the west of Asia as to 

 call for nn pnrticnlar^otice jo anyone acquainted wi th the Arabian 

 1 China Keview, Vol. IX, p. 204. 



