Indian Antiquary Vol 47

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 224

208
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[ACCUST, 1918
when rabid and Bibi Dost, Madonna, healed her votaries--if, as Mr. Tate sagely remarks, they are not fated to die. That the whole ritual is of great antiquity is obvious.
(a) It occurs separately in Sind and Balochistan. (b) In Sind it is part of the cult of the Virgin Mai. (c) It depends upon the Hindu calendar.
(d) Rice is the only offering made to the jackals at Mai Pir's shrine. The question is at what stage of pre-history the cult arose.
In this character as wolf-god ", Apollo is usually regarded as he who keeps away wolves from the flock, yet offerings were laid out in his honour just as in Mai Pir's case. A still closer parallel in ritual will be found in the association of jackals with the Roman Ceres, a "Mediterranean" deity, linking up whose cult with the East is the well-known incident in the legend of Samson, where "fox" is noted in the margin to connote "jackal." Further, one may cite the elaborate discussion by Mr. B. A. Gupte in his work on Hindu Holidays, where the details of the worship of Laksh mî are related at considerable length and a not unreasonable conclusion drawn that Lakshmi was purely a vegetation goddess. Thus, -diffused throughout the Middle East is a popular Ceres cult; to fix its origin or development would throw considerable light on the wanderings of people.
We may at least draw our own conclusions with regard to Sind; they require primitive man to be neither a believer in totems nor altogether animistic. He was of necessity very matter-of-fact, childish and fearful for good reason of the bigness of the world.
(i) Tribal religion is indissolubly connected with economics. (ii) Nature, red in tooth and claw, was a reality to primitive man. (iii) Divine help was the only remedy for rabies, or, in other words, rabies
was one ( the only) illness that mattered that he could not understand. The first and second propositions are truisms, though often forgotten, and the third is but a special case of the second. Others barely need elucidation. One obviously is the classification of the genus canis as dog and non-dog, the dog being the domestic servant and non-dog all the allied wild species. This classification is presumably still that of the X-W. Frontier, where wolves are said to be inbred with dogs in every third generation. Another is the dependence of medicine upon religion, this subject opening up a wide field for discussion on the psychological aspect of Fate, it being the residuum, the Incomprehensible, after all the old wives' medicines, the "tried remedies” of hakims and vaids have proved ineffective. We are no more advanced in Physician, heal thyself."
One further conclusion remains. It is a favourite axiom of anthropologists that the concept of maternity as a matter of observation precedes that of paternity, which is, pace Mendel, a matter of conjecture. It naturally follows that, the worship of the River being local and that of Ceres general, the worship of the Living God of the Indus was grafted upon the worship of Mother Nature, by a more advanced race, who ventured into the Hood plains and waxed fat upon agriculture. One might talk of Aryans and non-Aryans, for we think we know the Aryans, but criticism has dulled the virtues of the Aryan touchstone and the non-Aryans have still to be classified, One non-Aryan race we certainly know of locally, a pigmy brachycephalic race of hunters, who worshipped the sun after their Prometheus had taught them the use of fire, builders of dolmens and--but the subject of the Stone Age requires separate treatment.