Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 20, 2025
This was the first alligator I ever saw hooked; he measured sixteen and a half feet exactly, but words can give no idea of half the excitement that attended the capture. Native superstitions. Charming a bewitched woman. Exorcising ghosts from a field. Witchcraft. The witchfinder or 'Ojah. Influence of fear. Snake bites. How to cure them. How to discover a thief. Ghosts and their habits.
The child was a sickly-looking, pining sort of creature, rocking about in evident pain, and moaning and fretting just as sick children do. Gradually its attention got fixed on the strange antics going on. The Ojah kept muttering away, quicker and quicker, constantly shifting the bone and cups and other articles on the cloth.
I remember a case in which a poor little child had bad convulsions. The 'Ojah, or witch-finder, in this case a fat, greasy, oleaginous knave, was sent for. Full of importance and blowing like a porpoise, he came and caused the child to be brought to him, under a tree near the village. I was passing at the time, and stopped out of curiosity.
When a theft occurs, the Ojah is sent for, and the suspected parties are brought together. After various muntras, i.e. charms or incantations, have been muttered, the Ojah, who has meanwhile narrowly scrutinized each countenance, gives each of the suspected individuals a small quantity of dry rice to chew.
His body was suffused with perspiration, but in about half an hour the child had gone off to sleep, and attended by some dozen old women, and the anxious father, was borne off in triumph to the house. Another time one of Mr. D.'s female servants got bitten by a scorpion. The poor woman was in great agony, with her arm swelled up, when an Ojah was called in.
My opinion is shared by most planters, that there is no cure yet known for a cobra bite, or for that of any other poisonous snake, where the poison has once been fairly injected and allowed to mix with the blood . There is another curious instance of the effects of fear on the native mind in the common method taken by an Ojah or Brahmin to discover a suspected thief.
Setting her before him, he began his incantations in the usual manner, but made frequent passes over her body, and over the bitten place. A gentle perspiration began to break out on her skin, and in a very short time the Ojah had thrown her into a deep mesmeric sleep. After about an hour she awoke perfectly free from pain. In this case no doubt the Ojah was a mesmerist.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking