Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/318

 296 The Veneration of the Cow in India.

tribal ofifences.^^ They were in race akin to the Northern stock, and the inference that they, too, respected the cow is more than probable. Yet these people until quite recently, when they were converted to Islam, used to sacrifice bulls to Gish, their war-god, and cows to Imra ; when peace was made by settling the blood price after a homicide, the representatives of the rival clans used to dip their feet in the blood of a cow slain for the occasion. The flesh of the sacrificed animals was freely eaten. ^^

The case of the Todas is still more clear. They eat ceremonially at one of their festivals a young buffalo, which is their sacred animal.^^ Still more significant is the fact that they raise a wail at the death of the beast, as the women of Nestor's house did when the ox, the sacred family animal, was slain, though Homer's women do not lament when cattle captured from the enemy are slaughtered.^^ The cry in this case is not, as some com- mentators allege, one of exultation, nor an expression of sorrow. It is a ritual act to disperse evil influences from the stream of " our brother's " sacred life.^'^ The Todas are also careful to prevent the blood of the sacred animal being shed at the time of sacrifice, and the death of the victim is procured by crushing a vital organ in a most cruel manner, a fact which was familiar to the early Greek

^^Sir G. S. Robertson, The Kafirs of the Hindu-knsh, pp. 384, 391, 444 ; cf. Tacitus, Germania, xii.


 * Sir G. S. Robertson, op. cil., pp. 189-90, 636, 405, 389, 442.

and Monuments of the Nilagiris, p. 9.
 * Rivers, op. cit., p. 274 ; J. W. Breaks, An Accojint of the Primitive Tribes

Merry- Riddell's' note in loc. Compare the ceremonial flight at the Bouphonia,. J. G. Fraser, The Golden Bough (2nd edit.), vol. ii., pp. 294 et seq. ; Id., Pausanias, vol. ii., pp. 303 et seq. ; Miss J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, pp. \\i et seq. ; L. R. Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States, vol. i., pp. 56 et seq., 88 et seq.
 * Rivers, op. cit., p. 356; Homer, Odyssey, Bk. iii., 11. 450 et seq. ; with


 * ' G. Murray, The Rise of the Greek Epic (2nd ed.), pp. 86 et seq.