Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/304

 282 The Veneration of the Coiv in India.

To begin with the cow, — the feeUng of taboo attached to her shows itself through the whole course of the evolution of Hinduism. The respect for her, as contrasted with that felt for the bull, may be to some extent accounted for, as Professor W. R. Smith suggested,-'^ by the prevalence of kinship through women ; but a stronger motive lay in the fact that she was regarded as the chief source of food required by a pastoral tribe. The earliest Northerners who settled in India left the work of cultivating the soil to the dark, indigenous races. This was largely due to economic considerations, the new-comers being unaccus- tomed to agriculture. But we may conjecture that super- stition, which exercises a potent influence among primitive races, may have contributed to establish the practice. Farming was probably found to be inconsistent with the priestly functions of the Brahman because it is often closely associated with magic. Thus the ploughshare is regarded as a magical implement in the Atharva-veda, where we read for the first time of the ploughing of open fields with yokes of oxen.-^ There is, again, the common belief that ploughing is a violent and dangerous intrusion upon the domain of the Earth deity. Manu, whose view is tinctured with Buddhist sentimentalism, says, in his characteristic way, — " Some declare that agriculture is something ex- cellent, but that means of subsistence is blamed by the virtuous, for the wooden implement with its iron point injures the earth and the beings living in the earth." -*^ If this consideration has any force, it may help us to under- stand the statement that when Prajapati, lord of creatures, formed cattle, he made them over to the Vaisyas, whose business it became to tend them.-^ The occupation of

" op. cit., p. 298.

25 X. 6. 2, Sacred Books of the East, vol. xlii., pp. 84 et seq., 287 et seq., 356, 608 et seq.

26 X. 84. Cf. L. R. Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States, vol. iii., p. 42. 2" Manu, ix. 327, i. 90, viii. 113, x. 79.