Chambā State, on the borders of Kashmīr, the Devīs are goddesses who have power to cure diseases in man and beast; they are not, like the Nāgs, or true serpent deities, associated with springs, but it is common to find Nāg and Devī temples side by side, and similar attributes are assigned to both.[1] On the other hand, these Devīs, as promoters of fertility, are worshipped in Bashahr in the forms of little girls.[2]
This chthonic aspect of the Mother Goddess may be illustrated by the custom of burying in the earth portions of the victims dedicated to her. When a careful Athenian went to gather a certain medicinal root, he used to place in the hole a honeyed cake as an offering to Gaia, the Earth Mother.[3] For the same reason, at the Thesmophoria festival, live pigs were thrown into the underground sanctuaries of the goddess.[4] The pig, possibly on account of its habit of rooting up the ground to obtain food, was the sacred animal of Demeter and Kore.[5] In southern India, at the worship of the Grāmadevatā, or village goddess, a buffalo, which is also possibly on account of its black colour and brutish appearance a chthonic animal, the beast upon which Yama, god of death, rides, is buried in a pit close to the boundary stone which is occupied by the goddess.[6] In the same part of the country we find the custom of burying a live pig in the village street, where the cattle pass in and out on their way from and to the fields, probably as a prophylactic propitiation of the Earth Mother: in some cases the pig is buried up to the neck
- ↑ H. A. Rose, Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and the North-Western Frontier Province, i. 331.
- ↑ Ibid. i. 479.
- ↑ Farnell, op. cit. iii. 15.
- ↑ Ibid. iii. 89 et seqq.
- ↑ Miss J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 122; J. C. Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion, 87; Sir J. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 3rd ed. Spirits of the Corn and the Wild, ii. 16 et seqq.
- ↑ Bishop H. Whitehead, op. cit. 108, 111, 113.
