Reverence for ancestors constitutes almost the whole of Taiyal religion. None of the people of this tribe--or “nation”--seem to hold a belief in creators of the universe, such as is held by the Ami. The only deity--other than deified ancestors--whom the Taiyal apparently take into account is the rain-god, or rather, rain-devil. He, however, is a being very much to be taken into account in a country like that in which the Taiyal live--the mountainous part of the island--where torrential downpours of such violence sometimes occur during the rainy season that the bamboo and grass huts of the people are washed away. The Taiyal are not a people who cringe for mercy at the feet of deity or devil, any more than at those of Chinese or Japanese. Therefore, instead of prayers and offerings to propitiate the wrath or evil temper of the rain-devil, who is supposed to be responsible for the downpour, the chief priestess and assistant priestesses of the tribal group that is being inundated gather together, with long knives in their hands--these of the sort that are used by the men in head-hunting--and begin to dance and gesticulate. The dancing becomes wilder and more frenzied as it goes on, the gesticulations with the knives--thrusting and slashing at imaginary figures--more violent; the priestesses cry or chant in a threatening manner, while the people, both men and women, standing about, howl and wail. Often the priestesses foam at the mouth in their excitement, their eyes look as if they would start from their heads, and this knife-dance usually ends with their falling exhausted in a swoon, throwing their knives from them as they fall. At this climax the people shout with joy, declaring that the rain-devil has been cut to pieces; or, sometimes, that because he has been cut with the knives of the priestesses, he has fled away and been drowned in one of the ponds that he has been responsible for creating--being thus destroyed in the “pit which he had digged for himself.” Whenever the rain ceases--as in course of time it inevitably must--this is attributed to the warfare which the priestesses have waged against the rain-devil.[75] After having witnessed the almost maniacal madness of some of these sacred dances and ceremonies of exorcism on the part of aboriginal Formosan priestesses, one comes to the conclusion that the so-called “arctic madness,” of which some anthropologists speak (in connection with dances and other religious rites of _shamans_ and medicine-men of the North) is not peculiar to Hyperborean peoples, but is characteristic of all Mongol and Malay races, when under stress of religious fervour or other strong excitement. The same habit of almost hypnotic imitation, one of another, when under stress of terror or excitement that is said, by those who have been among them, to be common to sub-arctic peoples, also characterizes the Malay aborigines of Formosa, this being perhaps particularly noticeable among the Taiyal tribe.