The daily morning journal and courier., 1906-12-06

l lOuS parts or SOuIH lllul" "
 cal and Aryan influence. There are
 three special features of the system which broadly distinguish 1t from the
 worship of Siya and Vishnu. First, the ] village deities, with very few excep-
 lions are female, Viva and Vishnu
 are male deities, and their wives are distinctly subordinate to them. On the otbnr hand. nearly all the village deities are goodesses, though they have male attendants who guard their
 shrines and carry out their com mands. In the Telugu country there is q. male deity called Potu, ,Razu, or
 inc Royal Man, who figures sometimes
 as the husband and sometimes as the l
 brother of the goddesses, and in the
 Tamil country there is in almost every
 village a deity called Iyenar, who acts as guardian and night watchman and
 is supposed to patrol the village every |
 night. with flowing locks and flaming eyes. mounted on ghostly steeds, to | scare away the evil spirits. Then, sec 1 , ondly, the village deities are proprit- l atedF with animal sacrifices. No animal sacrifices are offered to Siya or Vishnu, |
 but to the village deties buffaloes, | 5 sheep, goats, pigs and fowls are freely l } offered, sometimes by the thousand Ill : some places as many as 10000 animals will be sacrificed in a single day. In inc Tamil country, where Brahmin in- , fuence is strong and the shedding of bIood is therefore discredited, the ami mals are sometimes offered to the male , attendants instead of to the goddesses themselves and a curtain is drawn before the images of the goddesses to . prevent their seeing the killing Of the
 victims, and no animal sacriflces are 7 ever offered to lyenar But It IS clear ? that these are later notifications Of
 the system, and that originally all Vll- |, lage deities were worshipped with ani- nal sacrifices. Then, thirdly, the pu- iris, l. e., the men who perform the V sacrifices and oficiate as priests are : not Brahmins. The priestly catsle Ill a Hindu society Is the Brahmin caste, s and in the temples of Vishnu and Siva all the cermonies are performed by
 Brahmin priests; but the priests Of the
 village deities are drawn from all
 castes except that of the Brahmins,
 and in the Telugu and Canarese coun-
 tries an important part of the sacrl-
 fees is taken even by the outeast
 Pariahs. In the more primitive villages
 where primitive customs still prevail
 if is remarkable how great num- a Der of people take an oihclal part III : the periodical sacrihces-the potter
 the carpenter, the today drawer the =, washerman. the Kurnam, or Magls- ,e trate and the different sections of the 'A Pariahs all have their appointed parts to nlay. and, in striking contrast to
 tbe Aryan worship controlled by the so Brahmins. the worship of the village ~ deities is marked by conspicuous ao- r. sence of sacerdotalism
 n- The names of the village deities are ye legion, and some of them are unintel- in ligible to the people themselves, put he many of them have meaning which of show the close connection of the deltles m, with country life, e. g. the village nm Goddess" "the Great Mother" the nd "the Little Mother" ''the Water God ia dess." "the Goddess Who Presides h. over Buttermilk," ''the Goddess Who ve sits under a Mango Tree" the GGod- CT dess of the Cart" Sc. One of the dei- mt ties universally worshipped in the Ia ks mil country is Mariamman, the god ,lv dess of smallpox, who both intiicts ano it, chases away this dread disease.
 K The symbols of the village deities arc he almost as diverse as their names Some nd times there is no permanent image ol b. symbol of the village deity at all, bu " special image of clay, about two fee ms high is made for each festival by th It's village potter. Sometimes the deity | sm represented by rough stone pilla lth standing under tree or In the opei Ire field, sometimes by fiat slab o in stone or a small conical stone not nor di- than six inches high, sometimes by tn el- figure of a woman carved in basrelie the unon a stone slab, and sometimes by .he stone image. I saw one image in tn lat Trichinopoly district which is typica ith of these more highly developed sym the bols It was a stone figure of a woman
 about two and a half feet high, Wit ird eight arms, and in her hands knife ust shield q, bell a devils head, a drum iva three prongued fork, a goad and per niece of rope. Very often the goddes of is represented only by brass or eartf vil- enware pot full of water, or sometime lth by seven pots of different sizes pie be one on top of the other In some village al- the earthen pot is elaborately decorate ase I found one filled with water, with V.i- silver two anna piece (2d) inside ar tue bunch of cocoanut leaves and oleal NeS der flowers in the mouth, surroundt lii9 by sheaf of mango leaves, all tic together by the tender shoots Of u @ u. plantain tree and then decorated vii as flowers and small silver umbrel ~. stuck on the top. In other villages |i ,ia earthen pot with a looking glass pla 4 is ed against it represents the deity, al 4,o in others again simply lighted lam ,.o0 One very common symbol of the villai | S deities is a stick or spear. In the Tan ,.at,. country it is very common to see o ily ~, or more iron spears stuck under tr ,ooo to represent some village deity, and n i,,,,+ the Telugu country Potu-Razu ,,oir nearly always represented by wood ,oro stick roughly carved at the top, Il
 or an attenuated bedpost.
 of In many villages the fire walki svs- ceremony forms a curious feature and the festival of the village deity.
 ob- one shrine near Bangalore it taR ys is place every year. A trench is d