Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/220

 194 ''' Hook-Sivinging'" in India.

Except in so far as signs of a fertility rite appear in it I have left untouched the extremely interesting case recorded by Duarte Barbosa,^' partly because a fuller consideration of it would have been irrelevant to my main thesis, partly because adequately to deal with it would lead me far beyond the limits I have set myself A few words about it may not, however, be out of place. We have in it an instance of a woman on the eve of marriage performing a ceremony the main features of which in this particular connection are of a very unusual and, prima facie, unmean- ing nature ; a ceremony, however, so closely allied to one that we have seen to be practised very widely in other circumstances that we are forced to the conclusion that they are fundamentally the same. We know how very commonly in India, as elsewhere, a woman prior to her marriage or once in her life is called upon to sacrifice her virginity, and that in lieu thereof certain substitutes came to be accepted.^^ That an act of ritual prostitution was extremely common in this part of India at the time of which Duarte Barbosa is writing is abundantly clear from his own account,^^ and in the absence of any more direct connection between hook-swinging and marriage the natural conclusion would seem to be that it was a rite performed by a woman as a substitute for the surrender of

p. 151). It may be for this reason, says Dr. llildburgh, that the victim was not bound to the cross-pole.

We have seen that in some parts a regulation against binding the Men'ah victim was in force, and it may be that in this suggestion of Dr. Hildburgh we have the explanation of it, and that the use of -the iron hook in the hook- swinging ceremony is due to the same cause which led to the prohibition against binding the Meriah victim, even although the hypothetical case in which the latter was suspended on a hook because of a regulation against bind- ing atid the practice of rotation were never both actually in force together.

^'^ Supra, pp. 155-6.

Anthropological Essays presented to E. B. Tylor, p. 189; E. Westermarck, The Histoiy of Human Marriage, pp. 72-80.
 * J. G. Frazer, Adonis Attis Osiris, vol. i., p. 60 ; E. S. Hartland, in


 * ' Duarte Barbosa, op. cit., p. 96.