Note 8 — KHOND1

“In these Khond sacrifices the Meriāhs are represented by our authorities as victims offered to propitiate the Earth-Goddess. But from the treatment of the victims both before and after death it appears that the custom cannot be explained as merely a propitiatory sacrifice. A part of the flesh certainly was offered to the Earth-Goddess, but the rest of the flesh was buried by each householder in his fields, and the ashes of the other parts of the body were scattered over the fields, laid as paste on the granaries, or mixed with the new corn. These latter customs imply that to the body of the Meriāh there was ascribed a direct or intrinsic power of making the crops to grow, quite independent of the indirect efficacy which it might have as an offering to secure the good-will of the deity. In other words, the flesh and ashes of the victim were believed to be endowed with a magical or physical power of fertilising the land. The same intrinsic power was ascribed to the blood and tears of the Meriāh, his blood causing the redness of the turmeric, and his tears producing rain; for it can hardly be doubted that, originally at least, the tears were supposed to bring down the rain, not merely to prognosticate it. Similarly the custom of pouring water on the buried flesh of the Meriāh was no doubt a rain-charm. Again, magical power as an attribute of the Meriāh appears in the sovereign virtue believed to reside in anything that came from his person, as his hair or spittle. The ascription of such power to the Meriāh indicates that he was much more than a mere man sacrificed to propitiate a deity. Once more, the extreme reverence paid him points to the same conclusion. Major Campbell speaks of the Meriāh as ‘being regarded as something more than mortal,’ and Major Macpherson says: ‘A species of reverence, which it is not easy to distinguish from adoration, is paid to him.’ In short, the Meriāh appears to have been regarded as divine. As such, he may originally have represented the Earth-Goddess, or perhaps a deity of vegetation, though in later times he came to be regarded rather as a victim offered to a deity than as himself an incarnate god. This later view of the Meriāh as a victim rather than a divinity may perhaps have received undue emphasis from the European writers who have described the Khond religion. Habituated to the later idea of sacrifice as an offering made to a god for the purpose of conciliating his favour, European observers are apt to interpret all religious slaughter in this sense, and to suppose that wherever such slaughter takes place, there must necessarily be a deity to whom the carnage is believed by the slayers to be acceptable. Thus their preconceived ideas unconsciously colour and warp their descriptions of savage rites.”8