to add a stick or a stone to the rude heap which marks the abiding-place of the deity. In the Vedas large trees, called Vanaspati, are addressed as deities, and the forest, as a whole, appears as a goddess under the name of Aranyānī, called “Mother of beasts,” abounding in food without tillage, in whose dark solitudes various uncanny sounds are weirdly described.[1] Aranyānī has now passed out of popular knowledge, but Vanaspati, in the form of Bansāptī Mā, “Mistress of the wood,” is, in Northern India, propitiated by flinging a stone or branch on her cairn, either as a mode of keeping the spirit under control,[2] or as a tribute to, or recognition of, the dreaded deity who abides in the dark places of the jungle. But she is developing into a goddess of the agricultural type, because village herdsmen who graze their herds in the jungle offer to her a cock, a goat, or a young pig, with a prayer that she will protect the cattle from tigers.[3] In the Central Provinces the cult of Banjārī Deo, possibly a deified member of the Banjārā carrier tribe who used to drive their cattle along the jungle paths, is so imperfectly organised that the deity who dwells in a cairn to which every one adds a stone, may be male or female.[4] The Paniyans, a forest tribe in Madras, worship a female, Kad Bhāgavatī, or a sexless deity called Kulī, who dwells in a stone or cairn.[5] Major Tremearne[6] suggests, in the case of Hausa deities, that this uncertainty about sex may depend upon a change from polyandry to polygamy, or upon the relations of the goddess with her consort; but this does not seem to apply to Indian deities of this class, who are so vaguely conceived that the question of sex becomes immaterial. Goddesses
- ↑ A. A. Macdonell, Vedic Mythology, 154. “Vanaspati, ‘Lord of the forest,’ in the Vedas primarily denotes tree” (Id. and A. B. Keith, Vedic Index, ii. 241 ).
- ↑ Sir J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 3rd ed. The Scapegoat, 15 et seqq.
- ↑ Crooke, op. cit. i. 115.
- ↑ A. E. Nelson, Gazetteer of Bilāspur District, i. 74.
- ↑ Thurston, op. cit. vi. 62.
- ↑ The Ban of the Bori, 418.
