Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 3.djvu/419

Rh neighbouring village led to a fight, in which two men were killed. It was the practice, a few years ago, at every Dassara festival in Jeypore, Vizagapatam, to select a specially fine ram, wash it, shave its head, affix thereto red and white bottu and nāmam (sect marks) between the eyes and down the nose, and gird it with a new white cloth after the manner of a human being. The animal being then fastened in a sitting posture, certain pūja (worship) was performed by a Brāhman priest, and it was decapitated. The substitution of animals for human victims is indicated by various religious legends. Thus, a hind was substituted for Iphigenia, and a ram for Isaac. It was stated by the officers of the Meriah Agency that there was reason to believe that the Rāja of Jeypore, when he was installed on his father's death in 1860-61, sacrificed a girl thirteen years of age at the shrine of the goddess Durga in the town of Jeypore.* It is noted, in the Gazetteer of the Vizagapatam district (1907), that " goats and buffaloes now-a-days take the place of human Meriah victims, but the belief in the superior efficacy of the latter dies hard, and every now and again revives. When the Rampa rebellion of 1879-80 spread in this district, several cases of human sacrifice occurred in the disturbed tracts. In 1880, two persons were convicted of attempting a Meriah sacrifice near Ambadāla in Bissamkatak. In 1883, a man (a beggar and a stranger) was found at daybreak murdered in one of the temples in Jeypore, in circumstances which pointed to his having been slain as a Meriah; and, as late as 1886, a formal enquiry showed that there were ample grounds for the suspicion that the kidnapping of victims