These
ceremonies last for five nights and consist of dances, in which only
men, fantastically painted and adorned, take part. On the fifth
night Molonga himself, personified by a man tricked out with red
ochre and feathers and carrying a long feather-tipped spear, rushes
forth from the darkness at the spectators and makes as if he would
run them through. Great is the excitement, loud are the shrieks and
shouts, but after another feigned attack the demon vanishes in the
gloom. On the last night of the year the palace of the Kings of
Cambodia is purged of devils. Men painted as fiends are chased by
elephants about the palace courts. When they have been expelled, a
consecrated thread of cotton is stretched round the palace to keep
them out. In Munzerabad, a district of Mysore in Southern India,
when cholera or smallpox has broken out in a parish, the inhabitants
assemble and conjure the demon of the disease into a wooden image,
which they carry, generally at midnight, into the next parish. The
inhabitants of that parish in like manner pass the image on to their
neighbours, and thus the demon is expelled from one village after
another, until he comes to the bank of a river into which he is
finally thrown.
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