Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/212

 1 86 '' Hook-Siijinzinz'^ in India.

of the Karwar ceremony''*^ shows that that also was very intimately connected with the fate of the crops. In both cases the victim was dragged across the fields, and it is difficult to form any other conclusion than that in the rite performed at Karwar we have a commutation, with possible accretions, of the earlier sacrificial offering of a human being.

There may possibly be some connection between hook- swinging and certain other forms of MeriaJi sacrifice. In Jeypore three human beings were offered, two to the sun to the east and west of the village, and one in the centre, with the usual barbarities of the Meriah. A stout wooden post about six feet long was firmly fixed in the ground, (one presumably for each sacrifice), and to the top of the post the victim was firmly fastened by the long hair of his head. After certain ceremonies and invocations he was decapitated, and then left to be devoured by wild beasts.^'

Again, Malkanagiri in the Vizagapatam district is de- scribed as having been a hot-bed of the MeriaJi sacrifice. Four victims were annually offered at the four gates of the fort, and six were killed triennially.^^

In these last two cases, which are no doubt more or less typical of others, it is at least conceivable that, owing perhaps to a shortage of human victims or a growing disinclination to take human life, the sacrifice of several men at various points of the village and towards different directions might in the natural course of things ultimately have been, even if it never actually was, succeeded by the killing of one man only, whose efficacy was, so to speak, made to go as far as possible, either by leading him round prior to dispatch, or by rotating him after the manner already described, either of which processes would have been a step towards "hook- swinging." For we have already seen that the victim does not always rotate while actually suspended. At Karwar,

^' Supra, pp. 157-8.


 * ^ E. Thurston, op. cit., p. 516, quoting Colonel Campbell, op. cit.

^* Madras District Gazetteers, Vtzagapatam, vol. i., p. 281.