Rest Days; A Sociological Study 69 



Arabs carried them to Madagascar, where they gave rise to an 

 elaborate distinction of days lucky and unlucky. In general, 

 some days were considered absolutely bad ; others were abso- 

 lutely good ; others were considered indifferent. Again, some 

 days were not regarded as good in general though still good 

 enough for special purposes ; one being excellent for a house- 

 warming, another good for marking out the ground for a new 

 town, still another was a lucky day to be born on. but a bad day 

 for business. Some days had a special peculiarity of their own, 

 thus children born on a certain day usually became dumb. The 

 character of a day, according to the Malagasy astrologers, de- 

 pended, in short, on what one of the twenty-eight lunar stations 

 it represented.^^ 



II. TABOOS OBSERVED AT CHANGES OF THE MOON 



We may well believe that the different appearances of the 

 moon were the first celestial phenomena observed with any degree 

 of continuous attention by primitive man. Not only are the 

 phases of the moon marked by striking variations in her form 

 and in the amount of light she radiates, but from night to night 

 she follows a regular path through the sky, changing her eleva- 

 tion above the horizon and appearing to occupy at her successive 

 phases different quarters of the heavens. Such phenomena pre- 

 sent elements of mystery not found in the sun's prosaic course, 

 and help to explain why some of the l®west of existing peoples 

 watch the succession of lunar phases with the most keen interest. 

 The central Australians have distinct names applied to the 



^^ Sibree, " Divination among the Malagasy,'' Folk-Lorc, 1892, iii. 220 

 sq. It is worth noting that in Madagascar the names of the separate days 

 in the month have been taken directly from the Arabic names for the 

 twenty-eight lunar mansions. It thus appears that these names have both 

 an astrological and a chronological value (Farrand, " Note sur le cal- 

 endrier malgache et le fandruana," Reviic des etudes ethnographiqnes et 

 sociologiques, 1908. p. 95). Among the northern Abyssinians lucky and 

 unlucky days are likewise determined by the lunar stations, though only 

 six or seven are reckoned, each containing from two to seven days (Litt- 

 mann, in Archiv fiir Religioiiszvisseiiscliaft, 1908, xi. 301 sq.). 



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