United States or Bosnia and Herzegovina ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The remembrance of ancestors is not unnatural at such a time, and sorrow may be expressed for their death; such is perhaps the case in the Nandi usage mentioned above the women sorrowfully take home baskets of elusine grain, and the bits that drop in the house are left to the souls of the deceased.
Yaos, known by the three vertical slits in their cheeks; slim Nandi, with perforated lobes to their ears; ebony Kavirondo; Sudanese of an excellent quality; Wanyamwezi from the country between Tabora and Lake Tanganyika, the very tribe from whom the German Askaris are recruited, and all the dusky tribes that stretch far north to Lake Rudolph and the Nile.
Hence when the Nandi have taken a prisoner they shave his head and keep the shorn hair as a surety that he will not attempt to escape; but when the captive is ransomed, they return his shorn hair with him to his own people. To preserve the cut hair and nails from injury and from the dangerous uses to which they may be put by sorcerers, it is necessary to deposit them in some safe place.
Ordinary food, nourishing the body and becoming a part of it, thus maintains it in its nonsacred character. This point of view appears in the practice of administering a purge as a means of ceremonial purification; the Nandi, for example, give a purge to a girl before her circumcision, and in some cases to any one who has touched a taboo object.
Thou art forgiving; thou art unforgiving; and thou art the chastiser of all who are rebellious. Thou art Lust, thou art the vital seed, thou art subtile, thou art gross, and thou art fond of garlands made of Karnikara flowers. Thou hast a face like that of Nandi, thou hast a face that is terrible, thou hast a handsome face, thou hast an ugly face, and thou art without a face.
And when at last the water sank, lo! there it lay, as it has lain until this moment, as if expecting thy arrival, to provide thee with entertainment. And when all is over, thou wilt very likely bless Nandi, instead of cursing him; since but for his awkwardness in rolling on thy elephant, thou wouldst never have known anything about it.
Surja Mukhi and Nagendra together had chosen the subjects, and caused them to be painted by a native artist, who had been taught by an Englishman, and could draw well. Nagendra had framed the pictures handsomely, and hung them on the walls. One picture was taken from the Birth of Kartika: Siva, sunk in meditation, on the summit of the hill; Nandi at the door of the arbour.
It seems not to exist among the Masai, a vigorous people with an interesting theistic system. The neighboring Nandi, who have clan totems, lay stress rather on the family than on the clan in their marriage laws, and their taboos include more than their totems; their excessive regard for the hyena may be due simply to their fear of the animal.
Further, the Cherokee precaution of leaving a clear path from the field to the house resembles the Egyptian invitation to Osiris, "Come to thy house." So in the East Indies to this day people observe elaborate ceremonies for the purpose of bringing back the Soul of the Rice from the fields to the barn. The Nandi of East Africa perform a ceremony in September when the eleusine grain is ripening.
The familiar form of Ganesh, the elephant-headed God of Wisdom, looms from the shadows of a vaulted shrine; Nandi, the sacred bull, stands beneath a carven canopy, and the great memorial of a bygone faith contains the identical galaxy of gods found in the Indian temples of the present day, for the thin veil of Javanese thought is a transparency rather than a disguise, softening rather than hiding the clear-cut outlines of the original idea.
Word Of The Day