Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/205

  Hook-Sivinging'' in India. 179

may have been, and to some extent still is, the all-important annual religious ceremony of these parts, by the side of which other periodical festivals were insignificant, it may be the case that in this myth we can trace the introduction among the aborigines of one of the principal gods of the Hindus, upon whose behalf the one great claim made was that it was he who first instituted the "hook-swinging" ceremony, and to whose wife Durga is now assigned the important function of presiding over it. So far as the myth is of any evidential value in an enquiry into the origin and significance of the ceremony it purports to account for, it points to "hook-swinging" as a rite intended to promote not only the fertility of the crops, but also that of the people themselves. As we proceed further in our enquiry we shall find ample support for the former aspect of it,^'^ while, as regards the latter, traces of it appear still to remain, as witnessed to by the man who said he was " hook-swung " because some of his children had died and he wished the lives of the survivors to be preserved.^^

Having, so to speak, cleared the ground somewhat, I propose to consider how far there is reason to believe that the Indian ceremony spoken of in English as "hook- swinging," had its origin in a form of human sacrifice, and to show from an examination of

1. Its geographical distribution,

2. Its similarity to a certain common form of human

sacrifice, and

3. The internal evidence and attendant circumstances of

the rite, that this theory does at least account more or less ade- quately for the main features of it, and that it is perhaps the most satisfactory one that can be framed. Doubtless important clues have been lost, and it may well be that at the hands no less of its performers than its exploiters " hook- swinging " has suffered many things tending to obscure the

^- InJ'ra, pp. 185-91. ^* Sttpra, p. 178.