Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/187

 BiLll-baiting, Bull-racing, Bull-fights. 155

not ; in other words, if it lives in spite of the cattle passing over it, its destiny {vintana) is considered to be overcome, and it is brought up. It is thus a form of augury to deter- mine the fate of an individual child, and in this respect it presents no analogy to the Bhil case. This Madagascar custom may be, as Sir James Frazer suggests, a kinship test.^^ The Bishop of Madras reports a complex rite, or series of rites, intended tq propitiate Peddamma, possibly a chthonic deity, who controls cholera and small-pox. At one stage of the proceedings " first a lamb is sacrificed before the goddess, and its blood is mixed with some cooked rice, and at the same time a pig is buried up to the neck in a pit at the entrance of the village, with its head projecting above the earth. The villagers go in procession to the spot, while one of the Madigas carries the rice, soaked in the blood of the lamb, in a basket. All the cattle of the village are then brought to the place and driven over the head of the unhappy pig, who is, of course, trampled to death, and, as they pass over the pig, the blood and rice are sprinkled upon them to preserve them from disease." ^^ This rite, as Mr. Hartland suggests to me, is apparently intended to mollify the goddess towards the people of the village performing the sacrifice, and to induce her to trans- fer her wrath to the next village. There may possibly be an element of magical consecration of the village by the burial of the pig, and, as a sacrifice involves an augury, there may also be a method of ascertaining the acceptance of the sacrifice by the goddess.

Other cases of the same kind are reported from India. Mr. Thurston ^° states that in former times the Lambadis, a class of Banjara carriers and traders, before setting out on a journey, used to procure a little child, and bury it in the

'■'^ TotcDiism and Exogamy, i. 21, quoting Ellis, History of Madagasiar, i. 157. '■^^ Bulletin Madras Miisemn, v. No. 3, 133.

^'^Ethnographic Notes in Southern India, 507, quoting Rev. J. Cain, Indian Antiquary, 1879-