Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v2.c16.31

v2.c16.31

¹ That the dead husband or wife can come back and have sexual intercourse with the surviving wife or husband, and even beget or bear children is a belief found elsewhere, too. Ploss-Bartels, ii, 589 ff.; Kirchhof, *Wendunmuth*, ed. Oesterley, iii, 515 ff.; Jülg, *Die Märchen d. Siddhi-kür*, Leipz., 1866, 9th tale; Crooke, *Pop. Rel.*, etc., i, 118; *Zschr. d. Ver. f. Volksk.*, ii, p. 299 (Herod and the dead Mariamne); viii, p. 335 (South Russian vampire); x, p. 124 (Icelandic); xiv, p. 322 f.; Krauss, *Slav. Volksforsch.*, 130, 135; Elsie Clews Parsons, *The Old-Fashioned Woman*, p. 110 f.; Goethe’s *Braut von Korinth*; Helgi’s return in the Edda; etc. It is here that the many vampire and Leonora tales belong. Much literature will be also found, at several of the places quoted in Krauss, as to the man who cannot part from his lifeless wife (a few Indian examples in J. J. Meyer, *Hindu Tales*, p. 77; see also Chavannes, *Cinq cents contes*, ii, 221 f.). Best known of all is the commerce with the dead woman magically kept from decay after the example of Charlemagne. *Hagen’s Gesamtabenteuer*, ii, p. 631 ff., iii, p. clxii f.; Weinhold, *Die deutschen Frauen i. d. Mittelalter*, ii, p. 8. This view must be particularly kind for Albanian women. There, when a woman after years of widowhood bears a child, we are told: "Her dead husband is a vampire and has visited her by night." *Zeitschr. f. Ethnol.*, "Abhandl." Bd. 26, p. 561. There is an interesting case in the Paramatthadīpanī, iii, p. 144 ff.: A vimānapeta induces the bride whom he has left by death to give a Buddhist begging monk a ball of thread; through this pious deed it becomes possible for her to taste divine pleasures. He fetches her in his heavenly chariot (vimāna); for seven hundred years, which to her seem seven, she is with him. When she leaves him the blooming wife becomes an old woman. By these last features this peculiar Indian Leonora belongs also to other cycles of tales, especially to that immensely extensive one which is best known to us by such tales as Wolfgang Müller’s *Mönch von Heisterbach*, or Irving’s *Rip Van Winkle*, and of which Hartland, *The Science of Fairy Tales*, (under "The Supernatural Lapse of Time in Fairy Land", pp. 166-195) gives a good, though of course highly incomplete survey. [From Melanesia for the case of marriage between a living man and a ghost woman cp. G. C. Wheeler, *Mono-Alu Folklore*, pp. 55-6, 188 (Translator).]