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MAY, 1878.]
ARCHÆOLOGICAL NOTES.
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the portentons flame-clad progeny of Siva, who is especially feared as presiding over family cliscord and misfortune, or else of Dharmaraja, the elder Påndava, to whom there are five hundred temples in South Arkat alone, and with whom and Draupadî the ceremony has some par. ticular association. In Ganjam and Maisur it is performed in honour of a village goddess, and everywhere seems connected with aboriginal rites and Siva-worship, Brahmans always dis- owning it. Messrs. Stokes and Mackenzie have described how it is carried out, and the reports to Government speak of the fire-pit as a narrow trench, sometimes twenty yards long and half a foot deep, filled with small sticks and twigs, usually tamarind, which are kindled and kept burning till they have sunk into a mass of glow ing embers. Along this the devotees, often fifty or sixty in succession, walk, run, or leap, barefooted; and not unfrequently the precaution is taken of forming a puddle of water at each end of the trench, for the devotees to start from and leap into. Such a trench I have seen the day after a fire-treading had been performed in it, and cne of the actors went along it with a hop, skip, and jump, to show how it was done. Sometimes, to make the rito more imposing and meritorious, devotees will pierce their eyelids, tongues, the fleshy part of their arms, &c. with long slender nails having a lighted wick attached to each end, and so accoutred tread the fiery path. This seems repulsive, but there is no real danger in the ceremony, as the reports to Government were obliged to admit; and Captain Mackenzie in his account observes that there "never was, nor could be, the slightest danger to life." Nor would there be orclinarily. In the case reported by Mr. Stokes, a sickly boy fell in the pit and received burns from which he died: the accident and result were owing to his condition; and, when it appears from Mr. Stokes's paper that the practico is now prohibited in Madras, the antiquary will be inclined to regret interference with primeval customs not essentially more dangerous than hunting or racing. Amongst similar exhibitions it may be mentioned that in the demon-worship so prevalent on the western coast, when celebrations are held in honour of
A century ago Sonnerat (Voyage aus Indes Orientales, Paris, 1782) described the Indians walking on fire in honour of Dharmaraja and his wife Draupadi,-first following their images carried in procession three times round a fire,
Chamundi, a much-dreaded female divinity (vide Ind. Ant. vol. II. p. 169), the dancer, who represents and is supposed to be possessed by her, dances and rolls upon a pile of burning embers without any injury, as is asserted. In the Nilgiri Hills, too, there is a sect of outcaste Brahmans denominated Jumpers (Haravar), from a rite in which they used to leap over a fire. Though claiming to be Saiva Brahmaņs, wearing the thread and abstaining from meat, they really have no caste, but live and marry amongst the Badagas, and work as coolies.
When official inqniries were made into the fire-treading practices in Madras, surprise was evidently felt that they should turn out to be so harmless. The minds of many probably reverted to passages in the Old Testament (e.g. Leviticus xviii. 21 ; 2 Kings xxiii. 10) where children are spoken of as being passed through fire to Molech, which have been generally regarded as denoting cruel sacrifices of living children, -an idea Milton has gone far to confirm by his well-known lines"Moloch, horrid king, besmear'd with blood Of human sacrifice, and parents' tears, Though, for the noise of drums and tim
brels loud, Their children's cries unheard, that pass'd
through fire To his grim idol." Commentators have usually adopted the same view, and drawn frightful pictures of a huge brazen idol in whose arms, heated glowing hot, children were placed and cruelly consumed. It is most probable, however, that the rite was as harmless as the Indian fire-treading, or as when children were passed through fire" by their mothers, almost in our own days, on St. John's Eve in our own islands, and still in Brittany. The Rabbinical commentators have strongly repudiated the common interpretation, and insisted that in all the Scripture passages on the subject there is no word used signifying to burn' ordestroy,' but' to pass' and 'to offer,' and they ask whether, when so wise and beneficent a king as Solomon is spoken of as permitting his strange wives'' worship of Molech, it can be believed he would have sanctioned the murder of little children. Theodoret, bishop of Cyrus,in Upper Syria, and then passing through it, slowly or quickly according to their zeal, and often carrying their children in their arms. -Tom. I. p. 153.
