Page:Pre-Aryan Tamil Culture.djvu/27

 were woven round this and other gods, of very ancient times, but yet numerous relics of South Indian religious life of ten thousand years ago are inextricably bound up with the worship of these gods to-day and these indicate the simple, ancient concepts and beliefs and customs of the Tamils of those far off days.

In the wooded tracts called Mullai, lived the Iḍaiyar, the men of the middle region, that lies between the uplands and the plains below. They were also called Ayar and Kōnār, literally cowboys. They led a merry pastoral life tending cattle and playing on the flute, kuḻal, made of the bamboo, or of the stem of the water-lily, or of the cassia fruit or of the creeper jasmine. Besides playing on the flute, they spent their ample leisure in love-making in the forests which afforded ample cover for their amatory proceedings. The god of the mullai region was māyōn, the dark-hued wonder-working kaṇṇan. Their old women sprinkled the paddy from a nāḻi, tubular corn-measure, along with sweet-smelling mullai flowers so that the bees swarmed round and sounded like the yāḷ and then bowed to their god. Accompanied by children and relatives the crows ate the white balls of cooked rice along with fried karunai, tuber which has dark eyes offered to the God.

The worship of māyōn was also associated with innumerable religious dances, which can be observed to-day in cowherd villages when the annual festival in honour of this deity is celebrated. These dances were called kuḍam or māyōnāḍal. In Vedic times, Kṛṣhṇa, the Sanskrit form of the name Kaṇṇan, was a god or as the Rig-veda called him a demon, opposed to Indra. In the Purāṇas, too, there are evidences of an ancient Kṛṣhṇa cult opposed to the Indra-cult of the early Rishis. In still later times Kaṇṇan became Kṛṣhṇa Paramatma, the fullest human manifestation (Avatāra) of Iśvara to the Indian people and has everywhere extinguished the worship of Indra. The legends regarding the boyhood life of Kṛṣhṇa have certainly come down from the ancient pastoral stage of human evolution, though not then localized in the forest of Brindāvanam. The bulk of cowherds to-day act out many of these legends and keep up the ancient pastoral dances of Kṛṣhṇa worship, but are absolutely untouched by the grand philosophical ideas which have gathered round the personality of KrṣhṇaKṛṣhṇa [sic]. I therefore hold that that the ancient god of the pastoral tribes evolved into Kṛṣhṇa and not that Kṛṣhṇa of the Bhagavad Gita deteriorated into a pastoral god in recent times.

The current theory about Kṛṣhṇa-worship is that the historical