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Updated: June 2, 2025
On the other hand the Khonds of India expel the devils at seed-time instead of at harvest. At this time they worship Pitteri Pennu, the god of increase and of gain in every shape. On the first day of the festival a rude car is made of a basket set upon a few sticks, tied upon the bamboo rollers for wheels.
It takes us far far back to the Totem stage of folk-life, when the tribe, as I have already explained, crowned a victim-bull or bear or other animal with flowers, and honoring it with every offering of food and worship, sacrificed the victim to the Totem spirit of the tribe, and consumed it in an Eucharistic feast the medicine-man or priest who conducted the ritual wearing a skin of the same beast as a sign that he represented the Totem-divinity, taking part in the sacrifice of 'himself to himself. It reminds us of the Khonds of Bengal sacrificing their meriahs crowned and decorated as gods and goddesses; of the Aztecs doing the same; of Quetzalcoatl pricking his elbows and fingers so as to draw blood, which he offered on his own altar; or of Odin hanging by his own desire upon a tree.
It appears, however, in such relatively advanced peoples as the Fijians and the Khonds. +79+. Moral retribution proper is found only in great civilized nations and not in all of them; the early Semites appear to have retained the old conception of punishment for ritual faults or failures, and for offenses against the national welfare.
Khonds in distress often sold their children for victims, "considering the beatification of their souls certain, and their death, for the benefit of mankind, the most honourable possible." A man of the Panua tribe was once seen to load a Khond with curses, and finally to spit in his face, because the Khond had sold for a victim his own child, whom the Panua had wished to marry.
The sacrificer first thinks of Brahmâ and the other gods as being present in the victim's body, and then prays to him directly as being all the gods in one. "When this has been done" says Śiva, who is represented as himself revealing these rules, "the victim is even as myself." This identification of the human victim with the god has many analogies elsewhere, particularly among the Khonds.
Something like this is reported of the Hervey Islands, New Zealand, the Hawaiians, and other tribes. Among the wild tribes of India, the Khonds and the Oraons, or Dhangars, hold to annihilation of the soul in certain cases. Miss Kingsley reports a specially interesting view in Congo to the effect that souls die when the family dies out.
At most a few villages may have clubbed together, as amongst the Khonds, to procure a human victim to be slain as representative of the corn-spirit for their common benefit. Such victims may have been drawn from the families of priestly kings or kinglets, which would account for the legendary character of Lityerses as the son of a Phrygian king or as himself a king.
Such influence is possibly to be recognized also in the systems of the Dravidian and Kolarian tribes, though in them there seems to be a native non-Aryan element. The Khonds have gods of rain, fruit, hunting, and boundaries.
Don't you know that it has been an expensive work to persuade the Khonds of Goomsoor to give up roasting each other in the name of Heaven? Very fine is Epictetus, but wilt he be your bail? Will Diogenes bring home legs of mutton? Can you breakfast upon the simple fact that riches have wings and use them? Can you lunch upon vanitas vanitatum? Are loaves and fishes intrinsically wicked?
A party of Khonds, who saw this, immediately pressed forward to comfort the seller of his child, saying, "Your child has died that all the world may live, and the Earth Goddess herself will wipe that spittle from your face." The victims were often kept for years before they were sacrificed.
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