One of the notable features of the Potraj festival of southern India, which Sir Walter Elliot has minutely described for us, and of which I gave a brief abstract in the previous chapter, is its orgiastic character. As type of the orgiastic god-making ceremonies, with their five-day festival, it well deserves some fuller description. The feast takes place near the temple of the village goddess, who is worshipped in the form of an unshapely stone, stained red with vermillion, the probable representative of the first human foundation-victim. An altar was erected behind this temple to the god who bears the name of Potraj. He is a deity of cultivation. The festival itself was under the charge of the Pariahs, or aboriginal outcasts; it was attended by all the lowest classes, including the dancing girls of the temple and the shepherds or other “non-Aryan” castes. During the festival, these people took temporarily the first place in the village; they appeared to {302}form the court of the temporary king, and to represent the early local worship, whose gods the conquering races are afraid of offending. For since the dead of the conquered race are in possession of the soil, immigrant conquerors everywhere have a superstitious dread of incurring their displeasure. On the first day of the orgy, the low-caste people chose one of themselves as priest or Potraj. On the second day of the feast, the sacred buffalo, already described as having the character of a theanthropic victim, was thrown down before the goddess; its head was struck off at a single blow, and was placed in front of the shrine, with one leg in its mouth. The carcase, as we saw already, was then cut up, and delivered to the cultivators to bury in their fields. The blood and offal were afterwards collected into a large basket; and the officiating priest, a low-caste man, who bore (like the god) the name of Potraj, taking a live kid, hewed it in pieces over the mess. The basket was then placed on the head of a naked man, of the leather-dresser class, who ran with it round the circuit of the village boundaries, scattering the fragments right and left as he went. The Potraj was armed with a sacred whip, like Osiris; and this whip was itself the object of profound veneration. On the third and fourth days, many buffaloes and sheep were slaughtered; and on the fourth day, women walked naked to the temple, clad in boughs of trees alone; a common religious exercise of which I have only space here to suggest that St. Elizabeth of Hungary and the Godiva procession at Coventry are surviving relics. (These relations have well been elucidated by Mr. Sidney Hartland.)