Note 124 — Introductory Essay on Caste (continued 2)

Primitive man thought that the life and all qualities, mental and physical, were equally distributed over the body as part of the substance of the flesh. He thus came to think that they could be transferred from one body or substance to another in two ways: either by contact of the two bodies or substances, or by the eating or assimilation of one by the other. The transmission of qualities by contact could be indicated through simply saying the two names of the objects in contact together, and transmission by eating through saying the two names with a gesture of eating. Thus if one ate a piece of tiger’s flesh, one assimilated an equivalent amount of strength, ferocity, cruelty, yellowness, and any other qualities which might be attributed to the tiger. Warriors and youths are sometimes forbidden to eat deer’s flesh because it will make them timid, but they are encouraged to eat the flesh of tigers, bears, and other ferocious animals, because it will make them brave. The Gonds, if they wish a child to be a good dancer, cause it to eat the flesh of a kind of hawk, which hangs gracefully poised over the water, with its wings continually flapping, on the look-out for its prey. They think that by eating the flesh the limbs of the child will become supple like the wings of the bird. If a child is slow in learning to speak, they give it to eat the leaves of the pīpal tree, which rustle continually in the wind and are hence supposed to have the quality of making a noise. All qualities, objective and instrumental, were conceived of in the same manner, because in the absence of verbs or abstract terms their proper relation to the subject and object could not be stated or understood. Thus if a woman’s labour in child-birth is prolonged she is given to drink water in which the charred wood of a tree struck by lightning has been dipped. Here it is clear that the quality of swiftness is held to have been conveyed by the lightning to the wood, by the wood to the water, and by the water to the woman, so as to give her a swift delivery. By a similar train of reasoning she is given to drink the water of a swiftly-flowing stream which thus has the quality of swiftness, or water poured through a gun-barrel in which the fouling of a bullet is left. Here the quality of swiftness appertaining to the bullet is conveyed by the soiling to the barrel and thence to the water and to the woman who drinks the water. In the above cases all the transfers except that to the woman are by contact. The belief in the transfer of qualities by contact may have arisen from the sensations of the body and skin, to which heat, cold and moisture are communicated by contact. It was applied to every kind of quality. A familiar instance is the worship of the marks on rocks or stone which are held to be the footprints left by a god. Here a part of the god’s divine virtue and power has been communicated through the sole of his foot to the rock dented by the latter. Touching for the king’s evil was another familiar case, when it was thought that a fraction of the king’s divine life and virtue was communicated by contact to the person touched and cured him of his ailment. The wearing of amulets where these consist of parts of the bodies of animals is based on the same belief. When a man wears on his person the claws of a tiger in an amulet, he thinks that the claws being the tiger’s principal weapon of offence contain a concentrated part of his strength, and that the wearer of the claws will acquire some of this by contact. The Gonds carry the shoulder-bone of a tiger, or eat the powdered bone-dust, in order to acquire strength. The same train of reasoning applies to the wearing of the hair of a bear, a common amulet in India, the hair being often considered as the special seat of strength.124 The whole practice of wearing ornaments of the precious metals and precious stones appears to have been originally due to the same motive, as shown in the article on Sunār.