Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 26, 1915.djvu/45

Rh ceremonially the sins of the dying man, and then to depart without turning back. He also notes that some thirty years ago, in the Jeypore State, when an epidemic of smallpox broke out, a goat, well fed and adorned, was marched to the hill pass leading to the Plains, and sent down to carry the disease with it. If these analogies be accepted, the human victim took the part of a scape-animal.

The rite at Ujjain, in which buffaloes are sacrificed at the Dasahra as a substitute for a human victim, is important in this connection.

From numerous accounts of the Dasahra celebrations in other parts of India two may be selected: that by the Bhīls, a primitive non-Aryan tribe in Western India, and that by the Brāhmans and Marāthas at Poona in the Deccan.

Some Bhīls, on the second day of the festival, sow barley in a dish filled with earth, keep it in the house carefully screened, watered, and tended till the ninth day, when the green stalks are cut "as an offering to the goddess." The people scramble for these seedlings, wear them in their turbans till they wither, and even then cherish them as sacred relics. Others clean their houses and call the Badva, or medicine-man, to perform incantations to invite the gods to the feast. The Badva is supposed to be possessed by the deity, but in order to ascertain if this be really the case, they lay in his absence some fruits of the sacred bel tree (aegle marmelos) in a line, and test him by making him point out which fruit was first placed. He is also required to predict the causes and cures of certain diseases, the prospects of the next rainy season, and of the occurrence of cattle plague. He is then taken to the shrine