suggested that it was as agents of fertility in general that the Mothers were deified. These cults, in their more ecstatic or hysterical form, prevail chiefly among the Dravidians of the south, where they are connected with practices like devil-dancing, spirit possession and the like, which are less common among the more sober and less excitable races of northern India. In that part of the country it is only in places outside Āryāvarta, the original Holy Land in the south-western Panjab, that the more brutal forms of animal sacrifice and ecstatic rites are found, as at the shrine of Kālī in Calcutta, Kāmākhyā in Assam, Devī Pātan in northern Oudh, and in Nepāl.[1]
The explanation, again, of Bishop Whitehead,[2] that the cult was based on Totemism, does not seem to be convincing. So far as we are acquainted with the principles of Totemism in India it seems to have affected social institutions much more than religious beliefs or ritual.
When Mother worship is taken over by Brahmanism it exhibits those naive attempts at organisation and the otiose symbolism and ritual which are characteristic of that form of belief. The Mothers are usually classed in well-defined groups, sometimes of seven, eight, nine or sixteen.[3] Their powers and activities in special fields are more carefully discriminated. In the standard form of ritual current in the lower Himālaya they are worshipped in connexion with Ganesa, lord of luck and controller of enterprises, as a preface to the other rites. The celebrant takes a plank, cleanses it with rice flour, and on its surface draws seven figures representing the Mothers, with Ganesa on the right, and on the left a representation of the Moon. He then makes a brush out of five or six stalks of the sacred dūb (cynodon dactylon) grass, and dipping it in cowdung,
