Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/203

 '' Hook-Siviuo^iiio^'^ in India. 177

cannibalism," but does not trace any connection therewith, nor does he seem to refer to it for any other purpose than to show that, just as other rites in the progress of civilisa- tion come to be substituted for human sacrifice, so the swinging of a pumpkin has been found to answer the same purpose as the " horrid rite " of swinging a man in the charak-puja."^^

Many years ago, when the study of comparative religion was in its infancy, Robertson Smith wrote : —

" No doubt men will not habitually follow certain practices without attaching a meaning to them ; but as a rule we find that while the practice was rigorously fixed, the meaning attached to it was extremely vague, and the same rite was explained by dififerent people in different ways, without any question of orthodoxy or heterodoxy arising in consequence. In ancient Greece, for example, certain things were done at a temple, and people were agreed that it would be impious not to do them. But if you had asked why they were done, you would probably have had several mutually contradictory explanations from different persons, and no one would have thought it a matter of the least religious impor- tance which of these you chose to adopt. Indeed, the explana- tions offered would not have been of a kind to stir any strong feeling ; for in most cases they would have been merely different stories as to the circumstances under which the rite first came to be established, by the command or by the direct example of the god. The rite, in short, was connected not with a dogma but with a myth." 2^

Thfs principle is now so thoroughly established and accepted that I make no excuse for brushing aside as of comparatively little value such explanations of the rite as have been offered by the people who actually practise it. Why this particular and peculiar rite and no other, is just what they are absolutely incapable even of suggesting. When reasons for its performance were asked from those

•^ VV. Crooke, Things Indian, p. 265.

'^ W. Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, pp. 16-7.

N