They make a clay
crocodile as large as life and set it up in the fields, where they
offer it food, rice-spirit, and cloth, and sacrifice a fowl and a
pig before it. Mollified by these attentions, the ferocious animal
very soon gobbles up all the creatures that devour the crops. In
Albania, if the fields or vineyards are ravaged by locusts or
beetles, some of the women will assemble with dishevelled hair,
catch a few of the insects, and march with them in a funeral
procession to a spring or stream, in which they drown the creatures.
Then one of the women sings, "O locusts and beetles who have left us
bereaved," and the dirge is taken up and repeated by all the women
in chorus. Thus by celebrating the obsequies of a few locusts and
beetles, they hope to bring about the death of them all. When
caterpillars invaded a vineyard or field in Syria, the virgins were
gathered, and one of the caterpillars was taken and a girl made its
mother. Then they bewailed and buried it. Thereafter they conducted
the "mother" to the place where the caterpillars were, consoling
her, in order that all the caterpillars might leave the garden.
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