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298 to add a stick or a stone to the rude heap which marks the abiding-place of the deity. In the Vedas large trees, called Vanaspati, are addressed as deities, and the forest, as a whole, appears as a goddess under the name of Aranyānī, called “Mother of beasts,” abounding in food without tillage, in whose dark solitudes various uncanny sounds are weirdly described. Aranyānī has now passed out of popular knowledge, but Vanaspati, in the form of Bansāptī Mā, “Mistress of the wood,” is, in Northern India, propitiated by flinging a stone or branch on her cairn, either as a mode of keeping the spirit under control, or as a tribute to, or recognition of, the dreaded deity who abides in the dark places of the jungle. But she is developing into a goddess of the agricultural type, because village herdsmen who graze their herds in the jungle offer to her a cock, a goat, or a young pig, with a prayer that she will protect the cattle from tigers. In the Central Provinces the cult of Banjārī Deo, possibly a deified member of the Banjārā carrier tribe who used to drive their cattle along the jungle paths, is so imperfectly organised that the deity who dwells in a cairn to which every one adds a stone, may be male or female. The Paniyans, a forest tribe in Madras, worship a female, Kad Bhāgavatī, or a sexless deity called Kulī, who dwells in a stone or cairn. Major Tremearne suggests, in the case of Hausa deities, that this uncertainty about sex may depend upon a change from polyandry to polygamy, or upon the relations of the goddess with her consort; but this does not seem to apply to Indian deities of this class, who are so vaguely conceived that the question of sex becomes immaterial. Goddesses