Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/221

  Hook-Sunnging in India. 195

her person. She was under an obligation, Duarte Barbosa tells us, to offer her blood to the deity before marriage,^" and, as from the nature of the case the notion of self- immolation is excluded, the offering of blood, whether by hook-swinging or in some other way, must have been analogous to the offering of hair that we read of elsewhere. As for the choice of this particular rite as a substitute for the sacred prostitution by which marriage was often preceded, I can only suggest that, if any importance is to be attached to the words which Duarte Barbosa puts into the girl's mouth, a blood offering, probably of menstrual blood, ma\' well have been the first substitute for the act of prostitution ; then any blood or sacrifice ; later a pro- sacrificial rite. These would appear to be more or less natural stages of development by which the actual sacrifice of a woman's virginity to a male deity became the mock sacrifice of the woman herself. As for the choice of this particular pro-sacrificial act ; if, as I surmise, hook- swinging was at one time a common and recognised sub- stitute for human sacrifice, it would as such be the most efficacious propitiatory act known to its performers, and, therefore, on purely a priori grounds, not unlikely to be chosen in this connection. Although, at first sight, there would seem to be no genealogical connection between hook-swinging and pre-nuptial prostitution, the suggested lines of descent appear to me of as direct a nature as those connecting the hair offering with the sacrifice of virginity, ''^ as to the existence of which, however difificult they may be to trace, there would appear to be no question.

It may have been remarked that in the hook-swinging ceremony of which I was an eye-witness, there are certain features which appear to have no counterpart elsewhere ; such as the touching of the ground by the man who inserts

•"Duarte Barbosa, op. at., p. 95.

"J. G. Frazer, "Artemis and Hippolytus," Fortnightly Reviao, Dec, 1904, pp. 9S5-6.