Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/297

 THE VENERATION OF THE COW IN INDIA.

BY W. CROOKE, B.A.

{Read at Meeting, November i^th, 191 1.)

Only those who have gained personal experience of the races of India can realize the widespread influence of the veneration of the sacred cow. In other countries, of course, we meet with instances where, like domesticated animals generally, she is the object of a profound respect, often developing into actual worship.^ For instance, in Phrygia, the slaying of an ox or the destruction of an agricultural implement was punishable with death.^ Pliny tells us that the Romans executed, just as though he had slain one of his tenants, a man who killed an ox to gratify^ his foolish concubine, who complained that she had never tasted tripe.^ The respect for the cow and other domesti- cated animals is well marked among many modern savage and semi-savage tribes, such as the Kenyahs of Sara- wak, and the Herero, Bantu, Damara, and Masai in

1 W. R. Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (2nd ed.), pp. 296 et seq. ; E. Westeimarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, vol. ii., pp. 493 et seq.', J. Hastings, Encyclopcedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. i., pp. 506 et seq. (N. W. Thomas). For Attica, Varro, De re rustica, ii. 5. 4, quoted by J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (3rd ed.), Part v., vol. ii. , p. 6.

-Nicolaus of Damascus, Fragm. 128, in Muller-Didot, Fragvi. Hist. Graec, vol. iii., p. 461, quoted by G. Maspero, The Passing of the Empires (1900), P- 330.

^ Natural History, Bk. viii., 70.