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tricks. Sacrifices are offered to the resident spiritsof cakes, honey, milk, if the people are Hindus, of small animals and fowls if they belong to other races, -and the branches flutter gaily with the ornaments and ex-votos hung upon them. If such a tree, as is

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often the case, happens to be a banyan, with its mysterious, self-planted avenues, and its tiers of leafy galleries, it becomes a suburb in itself, and the effect, to a foreigner's eyes, is indescribably picturesque and original. These solitary, sacred trees appear to be a survival of the very ancient practice observed by

the Kolarians when they first began to clear the forests which barred their way-that of leaving a portion of it untouched and sacred to the forest spirits.'

10. Of the Dravidian race, tribes are scattered through the central Vindhya region, while its bulk has, from pre-Aryan times to this day, covered the entire three-sided table-land sweepingly named Dekhan. In moral characteristics they, from the first, strongly contrasted with the Kolarians. They too live in village communities, but under a rule which leans more to the monarchic type, and, in all their ways, they show more public spirit. Equally good traders and farmers, they are patient, laborious, steadfast, and loyal-the material out of which the English trained some of those Sepoy Regiments which stood by Clive and Hastings through untold hardships and dangers, and some of which-far more admirable still did not waver in their loyalty through the late rebellion. Unfortunately, their religion is of a most barbarous character, and has exercised a baneful influence on that of the Aryan and semiAryan population, which professes the medley of Vedism, Brahmanism, and native gross superstitions, now known as Hinduism. They share the Kolarians' belief in spirits and goblins, and their priests are conjurers versed in all the practices and tricks of

1 That the Kolarians were the first to clear the forests and till the land, Mr. Hewitt is very positive; he even thinks that, although they learned the use of iron very early, and cut the trees with iron weapons, the great number of stone axes or celts found in various localities makes it probable that they did some clearing work with stone implements before they found out the use of iron.

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Shamanism. But this is a subordinate part of their religion. The most essential feature of it is the worship of the Earth, in the form of both god and goddess, as the giver and maintainer of life, and the adoration of the Snake as the Earth-god's special emblem. The Snake-god or King of Snakes is the wise and gigantic serpent Shesh-a name which casts a singularly vivid side-light on one of the many puzzles with which the Rig-Veda still teems. In several of those passages in which the priestly poets exhaust their ingenuity inventing abusive epithets for their Dasyu foes, they call them, with scathing contempt, Shishna-devas, literally: "whose God is Shishna or Shesh." The inference suggests itself almost irresistibly, and, moreover, leads us to suspect that many a passage wherein serpents and dragonmonsters are mentioned, may have a more direct and realistic meaning than was hitherto supposed. Thus, with regard to the ever-recurring battle between Indra and Ahi," the Serpent," invariably ending with the Aryan champion-god's victory, we cannot help asking ourselves: have we really always to do with a nature-myth? is that battle only an incident of the atmospheric drama, and is the Serpent always and inevitably a Cloud-Serpent? By the light of later ethnological studies, another and even simpler interpretation lies temptingly near: may not the serpent sometimes personate the Serpent-god of the Snake-worshippers-the Shishna-devas-and the battle between the Aryan champion-god and the Dasyu sacred emblem thus resolve itself into a poetical version of the long race-strife? It is certain, at all

events, that, in the enthusiasm and novelty of recent discovery, mythical interpretation has been greatly overdone, and, just as the word "Dasyu," which was at first declared to designate only the demons (of darkness, drought, or winter) whom the bright devas fought, is proved to apply quite as often to earthly, human foes; so the cloud-serpent of the uncompromising myth-theory may very well turn out to be, quite frequently, an allegorical presentation of the object of those foes' superstitious adoration. We are often brought down to earth from Cloudland with as unceremonious a shock.

II. Be that as it may, it is certain that snake-worship, utterly un-Aryan as it is, made a profound impression on the white invaders, so much so that, in the course of time,an Aryan snake-god-ARIÂKA— was invented; an impression plainly discernible, too, in the prominent place given to the NAGAS (snakes and, snake-people, half-human, half serpentine in form and possessed of supernatural wisdom) in the later classical poetry. They play an important part, too, in modern Hinduism, which has instituted a yearly festival in honor, not of mythical serpents, but of the real, live snakes, which do not appear to strike this apathetic people with a loathing and terror at all proportionate to the havoc they play with human life (see p. 40). This festival, which comes round towards the end of July, is of a decidedly propitiatory character. Pilgrims flock to the Nâga-shrines which abound in certain districts; the cities teem with snake-charmers, whose weird charges eagerly crawl around the pans with milk

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