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CHAPTER VII. 



Dreadful Consequences of a belief in Demon Influence, 



The reader, who has had the patience to follow us thus far, will, 

 we believe, have his mind impressed with one principal idea, viz., 

 that credulity and superstitious fear exercise so powerful an influ- 

 ence over an uneducated Singhalese, as to blind his reason entirely, 

 the moment his mind reverts to demons or to any thing relating to 

 them. Without such an hypothesis, it is difficult to believe that 

 there are men now living, who honestly and sincerely say and be- 

 lieve that they have actually seen demons, and have thereby fallen 

 sick, from which they recovered only by the aid of charms and 

 demon-ceremonies, and that by similar means it is in the power of 

 any man at any time to inflict disease or death or some other mis- 

 fortune on another. The account we have given of these spells, 

 and of the wonderful virtues believed by the Singhalese to be in- 

 herent in them will, we believe, only raise a smile of contempt and 

 pity in an Englishman's face; but if the Englishman knew to what 

 deplorable results this belief often leads, his look of contempt would 

 be changed to one of horror. 



In many of the inland villages of this Island factions, quarrels, 

 bloodshed, and crime have often been the consequences of this 

 belief in charms, especially in Hooniyan charms. One family living 

 at bitter enmity with another, with all their respective relatives 

 and friends ranged on either side and each trying to injure the 

 other in every possible way, by perjury, litigation, theft, and 

 assault, turning peaceful villages into scenes of misery, and harm- 

 less peasants into ruthless murderers, and thereby perpetuating the 

 feud from one generation to another, are not things of rare occur- 

 rence; and all this, either because a young man of one family hap- 

 pened on one occasion to prepare Hooniyan charms against a young 

 woman of another family, because he could not get her to marry 

 him; or because a man fell sick soon after an unfriendly neighbour 

 had been seen to bury a charmed image under his garden gate, or 



