A DAY AMONG DEVIL WORSHIPERS IN TRICHINOPOLY.
By Rev. J. M. Thompson
TOWARD the end of February or early in March every year a great festival is held at Puttur, a suburb of Trichinopoly, in honor of Kulamayee, a female demon, a sort of South India representative of the bloody Kâli of Calcutta. She has her temple in a lonely spot on the banks of the River Uyakundân, a branch of the sacred Cauvery, but on the occasion of the annual festival she is brought down to a branch temple in Puttur. Her devotees are principally either members of the thief caste, or cultivators, and low-caste people living in out-of-the-way villages and hamlets, and their worship is inspired by fear of her anger. Her desire for blood is very great, and, unless this is met and amply satisfied, her worshipers fear that during the year she will visit them with all manner of dreadful calamities. Hence on the occasion of the great annual festival these poor people crowd into Puttur in their thousands from all points of the compass. The day before the usually quiet neighborhood is all astir. Merry-go-rounds, swings, etc., are being erected, favorable positions for peep-shows are secured, and also stands, where the gambler may ply his nefarious calling. Booths and tents of all shapes, sizes, and colors are set up, and in these on the great day of the feast a busy trade will be carried on. During the night previous to or very early in the morning of the feast day, Kulamayee’s chief priest takes up his abode in the Puttur temple and there awaits the orgies which will begin683with the dawn. One thousand goats are demanded in sacrifice, and he, as representing the authority of the demon, receives the victims and professes to drink their blood. He is somewhat fastidious in his tastes and rigid in exacting compliance with his conditions. One of these is that each goat presented shall be perfectly black. A single white or colored hair will disqualify it, and it is ruthlessly rejected. As it is not so easy to find goats in large numbers fulfilling this condition, rigid insistence upon it has the twofold effect of considerably limiting the quantity of blood the man has to drink, and also of stirring up the zeal of the devotees by making their task more difficult; for so greatly do they dread the anger of the demon that they spare neither trouble nor expense in trying to find an acceptable offering. All night long the crowds have been gathering, and daybreak shows every road and street leading to Puttûr a stream of men, women, and children dressed in their picturesque holiday attire. Little black kids are wriggling in the arms of some, and full-grown black goats are struggling upon the shoulders of others. The streams converge at the point where the temple stands, where sits the priest side by side with the hideous representation of his demon deity. No preparatory rites or ceremonies are necessary as an introduction to the bloody scene. The first goat that arrives fulfilling the required conditions is promptly beheaded, and the priest receiving the reeking blood proceeds to drink it. For long, weary hours the disgusting scene continues. The surging crowd ever grows through the morning hours, and as the sun rises high in the heavens the scorching heat and the dust make the scene well-nigh unendurable. The noise is deafening. The din of the crowd, the cries of the showmen, the yells and shouts of those whose victims have been accepted, the blare of huge trumpets, and the almost childlike bleat of the goats and kids as they are being hurried to the place of sacrifice, make a conglomerate of sound that has to be heard before it can be understood. As the priest can only deal with one victim at a time, the afternoon is far advanced, and the sun is sinking down into the west before the end of the bloody scene is reached. When at length it is reached, a move is made to a spot across the rice fields, a quarter of a mile away. Here, during the year, under a tree by the side of a small irrigation channel, stand four granite pillars, without ornamentation or anything to suggest that they have any religious significance. But on the day of Kulamayee’s feast their existence and purpose are explained. They are the support of a temporary hut of plaited palm leaves, which for an hour or so on the evening of Kulamayee’s festival becomes the abode of her image. On the occasion of this visit, the priest with his idol is ensconced in a gorgeous pyramidal car, which is carried on men’s shoulders, preceded by an elephant lent for the occasion by the authorities of the great Vishnuvite Temple at Seringapatam, and accompanied by the music of many tom-toms and huge brazen trumpets, and by many thousands of people. Arriving at the improvised temple the object of the visit is explained. The priest has drunk so much warm blood during the day that his body needs to be cooled. The water in the irrigation channel has been previously dammed up, and now forms a pool two or three feet deep and several yards in width. The priest descends from his car of state and plunges into the water, not to bathe, but to drink, and the task he sets himself is that of drinking till the level of the water has fallen one span. When this is done, the festival is over, and Kulamayee is taken back to the Puttûr temple to spend the night; and the following morning she is taken back in state to the loneliness of her own temple on the river bank, where, in comparative neglect and congenial darkness, she remains, till the lapse of another year brings round her festival again. The Puttûr Temple is within five hundred yards of our mission house and chief mission premises in Warriore, Trichinopoly, and the festival is a field day for the mission. We are astir by daybreak—missionaries, native ministers, catechists, local preachers, and theological students—as large a staff of workers as we can muster. We get into a thoroughfare leading up to the temple, but far enough away from the noise for our voices to be heard. The strains of a Christian lyric soon attract attention, and the passers-by gather round us as, for longer or shorter periods, we tell them of the Saviour. Our audience is a very restless one and continually changes. Many with goats on their shoulders or in their arms stop and listen for a while, and then rush on with their victims. Others who have been earlier to the temple are now returning with the headless, skinless carcasses of their victims slung upon their shoulders. Some of these will stop with their ghastly, bleeding burdens for a few moments, but the majority of them are too much excited by the fact that their offering has been accepted, and by the prospect of the feast that awaits them when they get back to their villages, to give any heed to the voice that cries to them from the wayside. On they rush with eager haste to prepare what will be for them and their families probably the heartiest, heaviest, and merriest meal in the whole year.—Wesleyan Record.