Page:South-Indian Images of Gods and Goddesses.djvu/247

 spurts out, (6) thrusting a spear through the abdomen 1 and (7) carrying on head the karagam, lamps of ghee, or earthen pots with blazing fire in them. Annual festivals called jatras are generally held in honour of the village deities. But when infectious diseases among men and cattle prevail, special worship is arranged for, to appease the deities by sacrificing animals, offering heaps of cooked rice mixed with blood, or by carrying the karagam. This last is celebrated by dressing the selected person who has taken a vow to perform the ceremony, in the yellow cloths of a woman, putting on him the ornaments of women and making him carry on his head a pot or pots profusely decorated with flowers and margosa leaves and supposed to contain in them the spirit of the particular goddess for whose propitiation the ceremony is gone through. A class of Tamil-speaking gardeners, called Tigalas in Mysore and allied to the Pallis or Vanniyans of other districts, are particularly devoted to the five Pandavas of the Mahdbharata story, and to their common wife, Draupadl. DRAUPADI The illustration from the courtyard of the Draupadl temple * em P les an < at Kumbakonam (fig. 139) shows a group, in which the figure of Bhadrakali with eight arms and a flaming crown, crushing the head of a giant under her left foot, is dis- tinctly seen. The original goddess of the temple is, however, Draupadl whose metallic figure with that of Arjuna, one of her five husbands, is preserved in the central shrine. The two huge heads seen in the illustration, next to Bhadra- kall, are those of the hero, Aravan said to be a son of Arjuna by a Naga princess. He is believed to have been offered as a sacrifice on the great battle-field of Kurukshetra, especially with the object of securing success to the Pandava brothers. Substantial big temples are built for Draupadl and the Pandavas under the name Dharmaraja in the country round Kolar and Bangalore. The karagam-carrying ceremony is performed every year and attracts immense crowds of excited sightseers. The central figure of the ceremony is the priest who, as he madly trips along with the sacred weight over his head, like a high tiara decorated with flowers, is closely followed by a select number of men the supposed attendant deities with drawn swords in their hands. This scene very strongly reminds one of the goddess SulinT, who has been described above to be one of the Tantrik goddesses,

1 Some of these inhuman practices seem to be but remnants of the older human sacrifices which were once quite a common feature of Sakti worship. Epigraphical evidence has been adduced to show that voluntary human sacrifices were offered even to the male deity Virabhadra (above, p. 161, footnote 2). I5-A