Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/195

Rh displaced from their memories by others of more recent date. Should these ancient legends be forgotten, many of the words in the Toda prayer would become meaningless to those who use them. If the story of Korateu were forgotten, six of the clauses of the Makars prayer would be unintelligible to the dairyman who five times a day recites them. I believe that this has already happened in some cases; there were certain kwarzam which the Todas seemed quite unable to explain, and the last kwarzam of the Kuuḍr prayer on page 169 is one of which only a very incomplete explanation could be given.

I do not think that meaningless religious formulæ are often the outcome of such a process, but I think the Toda prayer should be borne in mind as an example of one way in which a people may come to use forms of words which are devoid of meaning.

A further point of interest lies in the kwarzam itself. That objects should have two names, one for sacred purposes and one for every-day use, is, of course, a familiar fact to students of anthropology, but the Toda kwarzam is something more than this. The kwarzam which are of especial interest are those which consist of sentences rather than words, sentences expressing actions or incidents either in the lives of the deities or in the history of the institutions in which the words are used. At a Toda funeral, it is customary to recite the virtues of the deceased in the form of sentences to which the name kwarzam is also given. These are similar in form to the more complex kwarzam, of the dairy formula, and it seems possible that after the death of men or buffaloes whose lives had had in them something of the miraculous, kwarzam were inserted in the prayers of the same kind as those used in the funeral songs, or, to put it in another way, that when the Todas wished to commemorate in their prayers a wonderful event, they used the same kind of formula which they were in the habit of using when extolling the virtues of their dead.