Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/34

26 moustache is shaved off and his waist-string is cut, and he is given a new cloth. This part of the ceremony is, for men and women, of a purificatory nature. The end of the ceremony is a good feed, on the sheep that was killed, with rice, etc., in which those present are supposed to be joined by the ancestors.

The spirits of ancestors are fed on all occasions of festivity. Venkatêsu, the Vaishnava deity of the famous Tirupati shrine—which is not very far from where these notes were made—to which pilgrims flock from every part of India, is their chief god, but the malicious village goddesses, Poleramma, Ellamma, and others, as well as ancestral spirits, are given the most attention. Ancestral spirits are worshipped and fed after every death.

The Margosa tree (Melia azadirachta) is likewise worshipped by the Wadders, whose regard for certain trees, a leaf, a branch, a fruit of which they will not touch, after which certain of their gotrams are called, seems to give the idea that totemism once obtained amongst them.

They have a tradition of their having been at one time a warlike people of the Lunar race, under their own king; and account for their dispersion and present condition of wanderers in the following manner:—Their king put to death several goldsmiths, because a man of that caste had misappropriated some of the gold which the king had given him to form into a jewel. Those who survived this act of tyranny resolved on revenge, and having retired into a fort which held some magical properties, induced the king and his minister to visit them in order to witness a play, and having got them comfortably seated on mats, blew them up with gunpowder, which had been concealed beneath the mats. For having thus successfully out-rivalled Guy Fawkes they were obliged to flee in all directions; and so they became dispersed, and digging the earth is their occupation.

Unless we agree with Dr. Oppert that gunpowder was known to the earliest inhabitants of India of whom we