Notes on the entering of another’s body

Note: this text is extracted from Book I, chapter 4:

“Immediately Indradatta, who was an adept in magic, said: ‘I will enter the body of this dead king; let Vararuci prefer the petition to me, and I will give him the gold, and let Vyāḍi guard my body until I return’”

This forms the leading event of the story of Fadlallah in the Persian tales. The dervish there avows his having acquired the faculty of animating a dead body from an aged Brāhman in the Indies (Wilson).--

The same story as that in our text occurs in Merutuṅga’s Prabandha-cintāmaṇi. See Tawney’s translation, Bib. Ind., 1899, p. 170. On p. 10 of the same work the king enters the body of one of his own elephants, besides that of various other animals.

It has been reported from Buddhist sources that the same thing actually happened at the death of Candragupta, the Maurya monarch. His dead body was occupied by a Yakṣa named Devagarbha. (See Benfey, Das Pañcatantra, vol. i, p. 123.)

The idea of the soul leaving the body and going on its travels originates in the ancient Egyptian Ka, or “double.” In the “Adventure of Satni-Khamoîs with the Mummies” (Maspero’s Stories of Ancient Egypt, 1915, pp. 119, 120) we read: “And Nenoferkephtah was not alone in the tomb, but his wife Ahuri, and Maîhêt his son were with him; for though their bodies reposed at Coptos, their double was with him by virtue of the book of Thoth.” This story dates from Ptolemaic times.

The belief in a “double” is world-wide, as will be seen from A. E. Crawley’s article, “ Doubles,” in vol. iv, p. 853 et seq., of Hastings’ Ency. Rel. Eth. Among the Hindus there is a wide belief that when a man is asleep his soul leaves him and goes travelling, or whatever else it has a mind to do. When the body is thus left empty there is always the possibility of it being tenanted by some passing stranger—hostile or friendly. Hindus are very cautious about waking up a sleeping friend lest his soul be absent. Crooke says (Folk-Lore of Northern India, vol. i, 1896, p. 232) that in Bombay it is considered most reprehensible to play jokes on a sleeping person, such as painting the face in fantastic colours, or giving moustaches to a sleeping woman. The absent soul on returning would never be able to recognise its body, and depart altogether, leaving the body a corpse. Cf Frazer, Taboo and Perils of the Soul, pp. 37 and 49.

The ancient idea of the wandering soul has given rise to a motif in Eastern fiction called by various names, such as dehāntara-āveśa, anya-deha-praveśako yogaḥ, etc., which we may translate as “entering another’s body.” It is this motif which has given the rāwl an excellent opportunity of introducing all kinds of situations and exciting incidents into his tales. Our story of King Nanda and Indradatta is a good example of the use to which the motif can be put.

As the “entering another’s body” motif occurs again in Chapter XLV of this work, I shall have more to say in a further note, especially with regard to a paper by Professor Bloomfield, entitled “On the Art of Entering Another’s Body,” Proc. Amer. Philoso. Soc., lvi, 1. I shall, however, conclude this note by stressing the fact that there are two distinct motifs in connection with the “soul.” One is connected with the possession of the magical power (yoga) of leaving one’s own body and entering that of a dead person or animal, which can be looked upon as a more developed form of the idea of the “wandering soul.”

The other motif is recognised by the fact that a person regularly keeps his “heart,” “soul,” or “life” in an extraneous object. This is the “external soul” or “life-index” motif

The two motifs are perfectly clear and distinct, but, as both W. Crooke and E. Sidney Hartland have muddled them up (see below), some elucidation seems necessary. An excellent example of the motif with which we are here concerned—that of “entering another’s body”—forms the ladies’ thirtieth story in Gibb’s History of the Forty Vezīrs, p. 313. The story is still current in Kashmir and was told with only slight differences to Sir Aurel Stein in 1896 by a professional story-teller named Hātim Tilawôñ^u, of Panzil in the Sind Valley. It appears as “The Tale of a Parrot” in Stein and Grierson’s Halims Tales, 1923, pp. 5-11. On pp. xxxi and xxxii of the same work both Crooke and Hartland comment on the story. The latter quotes Gibb’s tale and wrongly says it is an example of the “separable soul” cycle. He also makes a mistake in his short résumé of the story itself, as the king is not “forced to enter and reanimate a dead parrot,” he does it entirely of his own free will, to show his vezīr how clever he is. The forcing comes in when he finds later he is unable to re-enter his own body as it is already occupied— so he is forced to await his opportunity while still in the body of the parrot. On p. xxxii Crooke says: “The tale under consideration is what has been called ‘The Life-index’ of the king.” This is equally wrong. It is clearly no life-index at all, and it is hard to conceive how Crooke could consider it such. It is a very obvious example of the motif of “entering another’s body.”

In a later note I shall discuss the “life-index” or “external soul” motif at some length, so that the difference between these two “soul” or “life” motifs will be even still clearer.—n.m.p.