Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/217

  Hook-Sivinging in India. 191

who officiates as priest on the occasion says : — "O, Mahadeo, we sacrifice this man to you according to ancient customs. Give us rain in due season, and a plentiful harvest." Then, with one stroke of the axe, the head of the image is struck off, and the body is removed and buried. The Gonds make a similar offering to their Baradeo, and it is not always in effigy that the human sacrifice is made. There are grounds for concluding that the practice was observed by all the peoples of Davidian origin." "2

It is hardly necessar}', or perhaps relevant, to point to the evidence of human sacrifice for rain which we meet with in other parts of the world. At Lagos, for example, it was the custom soon after the spring equinox to impale a young girl, in order that the goddess presiding over the rain might thereby be propitiated."^ A somewhat similar sacrifice took place in Benin, where a young woman was lashed to a scaffolding upon the summit of a tall blasted tree where she was devoured by the turkey buzzards.''^ In the same place, if there was too much rain, a woman was clubbed to death and then placed up in the same tree.'^ Again, in the Bible we read how, after a three years' ' famine, King David searched out the seven sons of Saul and delivered them into the hands of the Gibeonites, who "hanged them in the hill before the Lord at the beginning of barley harvest," where they remained, watched by Rizpah the mother of two of them, " until water dropped on them out of heaven," after which they were taken down and buried in the sepulchre of their fathers. These men, it will be noticed, were put to death at the beginning of harvest, and the fact of their having been retained on the gallows until the wet season points to the possibility of

"-E. T. Dalton, Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal, pp. 258-9. ^••J. G. Frazer, Spirits of the Corn and of the IVill, vol. i., p. 239. "■•E. Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, vol. i., p. 449.

''^ Ibid., vol. i., p. 444.