Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/211

 "■^ Hook-Sivinging'' in hidia. 185

as fourteen effigies of elephants, which had been used in former sacrifices." ^^

A post of this kind is now in the Madras museum, and is obviously designed to facilitate the rotation of the victim, presumably in order that everyone might have an equal chance of getting a share of the sacred flesh. If, as I suspect, " hook-swinging" is the lineal descendant of human sacrifice, we appear to have here a form which, in process of time, might easily fine down to it ; and in the course of the pro- cess it is not inconceivable that the intended victim may have been given a chance of defending himself, and that the shield and sword with which, as we have seen, the hook- swinging devotees are in many places provided, weapons which even find their way into the hands of the effigy Sidi- Viranna,^ may be thus accounted for. We are told that in Chinna Kimedi this was a " most common way" of offering the JMcriah. Elsewhere something closely resembling it was probably neither unknown nor unpopular, for such an equitable arrangement as the rotation of the victim could not fail to commend itself, and it may well be the case that the popularity of this particular method accounts for the fact that rotation in some form or other is a common feature of nearly all our hook-swinging accounts.

In another form of the Meriah sacrifice,

" the victim is dragged along the fields, surrounded by a crowd of half intoxicated Khonds who . . . with their knives cut the flesh piecemeal from the bones, . . . till the living skeleton, dying from loss of blood, is relieved from torture, when its remains are burnt, and the ashes mixed with the new grain to preserve it from insects." ^'^

This was, of course, a fertilisation rite, and an examination

Khondistan, quoted by E. Thurston, Ethnop-aphic Notes in Southern India, pp. 514 et seq.
 * ^ Col. Campbell, Personal Narrative of Service among the Wild THbes of

'^ Supra, p. 169.


 * E. Thurston, op. cit., p. 515, on authority of Colonel Campbell, op. cit.