man must daily accomplish. When he has performed the dawn ablution, and meditated on the effulgent sun-light which is Brahma, the supreme soul, he proceeds to worship the sun, standing on one foot and resting the other against his ankle or heel, looking toward the east, and holding his hands open before him in a hollow form. At noon, when he has again adored the sun, it is sitting with his face to the east that he must read his daily portion of the Veda; it is looking toward the east that his offering of barley and water must be first presented to the gods, before he turns to north and south; it is with first and principal direction to the east that the consecration of the fire and the sacrificial implements, a ceremony which is the groundwork of all his religious acts, has to be performed.[1] The significance of such reverence paid by adorers of the sun to the glorious eastern region of his rising, may be heightened to us by setting beside it a ceremony of a darker faith, displaying the awe-struck horror of the western home of death. The antithesis to the eastward consecration by the orthodox Brahmans is the westward consecration by the Thugs, worshippers of Kali the death-goddess. In honour of Kali their victims were murdered, and to her the sacred pickaxe was consecrated, wherewith the graves of the slain were dug. At the time of the suppression of Thuggee, Englishmen had the consecration of the pickaxe performed in make-believe in their presence by those who well knew the dark ritual. On the dreadful implement no shadow of any living thing must fall, its consecrator sits facing the west to perform the fourfold washing and the sevenfold passing through the fire, and then it being proved duly consecrated by the omen of the coco-nut divided at a single cut, it is placed on the ground, and the bystanders worship it, turning to the west.[2]
These two contrasted rites of east and west established
