"Hook-Swinging" in India.
157
do it in reverence to the pagod; and then they let him down and put a rope through the holes which the hooks had made, and fastening that cord to the pagod they draw him by little and little to the statue by that cord; then the women of the pagod conduct him to the statue to reverence it, and after this they take care to heal him if they can. And this they do by a vow or promise to the pagod to obtain any thing, or in sickness to recover health."[1]
Hamilton, who witnessed the ceremony at Karwar, on the Kanarese coast, early in the eighteenth century, thus quaintly describes it:—
"There is one trick that the priests yearly put upon the people in this country, that would puzzle the best merry-andrews in Europe to imitate, and that is, about the latter end of May, or the beginning of June, there is a feast celebrated to the infernal gods, with a divination or conjuration to know the fate of the ensuing crop of corn. The ceremony I saw here, and at other places on the coast of Canara. The priests having persuaded some fools to bear a part in the farce, proclaim the feast to be on such a day, at a certain grove, where several thousands of people assemble, and in the middle of the grove is placed a black stone of 3 or 400 weight, [sic] without any designed shape, but some places bedaubed with red lead mixed in oil, to serve for a mouth, eyes and ears, with a little earthen pot of fire placed before the stone, and a girl about ten years of age to attend to it.
Some priests, all naked, except a bit of cloth to hide their privities, run and dance round the stone and fire for half an hour, like mad-men, making strange distortions in their phizes, and now and then bellowing like calves. This was the first scene. Those priests had erected a scaffold on two axle-trees, that had trucks fitted for them like the carriage of ship guns. In the middle of the scaffold (which might be about 15 feet long, and as broad) was erected a piece of wood about 15 feet high, with a notch cut in the upper end, like the cheeks of a ship's pump, with holes bored for a bolt to pass through, as pump cheeks have. A tree hewn for their purpose, about 40 feet long, was laid about the
- ↑ "Gaspero Balbi's Voyage to Pegu," in Pinkerton's Voyages and Travels, vol. ix., p. 398.
