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Among the Khonds a birth is celebrated on the seventh day after the event by a feast given to the priest and to the whole village. To determine the child's name the priest drops grains of rice into a cup of water, naming with each grain a deceased ancestor.
Even to this day, the wild Khonds in the Indian mountains, and the Red men of America, sacrifice human beings at times, and, I fear, very often indeed; and believe that the gods will be the more pleased, and more certain to turn away their anger, the more horrible and lingering tortures they inflict upon their wretched victims.
+35+. Similar theories of birth are found among the Eskimo and the Khonds, in Melanesia, in West Africa, and elsewhere. Such views thus appear to have been widely diffused, and are in fact a natural product of early biological science. They embody the earliest known form of the doctrine of reincarnation, which is so important in the Buddhistic dogma.
The story that the fragments of Osiris's body were scattered up and down the land, and buried by Isis on the spots where they lay, may very well be a reminiscence of a custom, like that observed by the Khonds, of dividing the human victim in pieces and burying the pieces, often at intervals of many miles from each other, in the fields.
In that case, what will such a missionary, if sent to the Khonds of Orissa, say, when he finds them praying thus: "We are ignorant of what it is good to ask for. You know what is good for us.
Of the Khonds of Central India it is said that they, "in common with many other wild races, bear a singular character for truthfulness and honesty;" and that especially "the aborigine is the most truthful of beings." "The Khonds believe that truthfulness is one of the most sacred of duties imposed by the gods." "They are men of one word." "The truth is by a Sonthals held sacred."
But it does not exactly follow that the prehistoric Greeks would adopt Egyptian gods; or that the Thesmophoria, an Athenian harvest-rite of Demeter, was founded by colonists from Egypt, answering to the daughters of Danaus. Egyptians certainly did not introduce the similar rite among the Khonds, or the Incas.
Still further light is shed upon the real sources of the practice, as well as upon the improvement of the status of woman through the practice, by an English student of conditions in India. The influence and privileges of women are exceedingly great among the Khonds, and are, I believe, greatest among the tribes which practice infanticide.
Truthfulness of Achilles. Plato. Aristotle. Theognis. Pindar. Tragedy of Philoctetes. Roman Standard. Cicero. Marcus Aurelius. German Ideal. Veracity a Primitive Conception. Lie Abhorrent among Hill Tribes of India. Khonds. Sonthals. Todas. Bheels. Sowrahs. Tipperahs. Arabs. American Indians. Patagonians. Hottentots. East Africans. Mandingoes. Dyaks of Borneo, "Lying Heaps." Veddahs of Ceylon.
The non-Aryan tribes of India have been so long in contact with Aryan civilization that in many cases, as it seems, their original customs have been obscured, but at present among such agricultural tribes as the Hos, the Santhals, and the Khonds of Bengal, and some others, totemic organizations are not prominent, and the Todas, with their buffalo-cult, show no signs of totemism.
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