than a thousand all told, who have retired out of the stress of
the world into the fastnesses of the Nilgiri Hills, in southern India,
where they spend a safe but decidedly listless life. They are in a
backwater, and are likely to remain there. At any rate, their religion
is not such as to make them more enterprising. Gods they may be said
to have none. The bare names of certain deities of the hill-tops are
retained, but whether these were once the honoured gods of the Todas
or, as some think, those of a former race, certain it is that there
is more shadow than substance about them now. The real religion of
the people centres round a dairy-ritual. From a practical and economic
point of view, the work of the dairy consists in converting the milk
of their buffaloes into the butter and buttermilk which constitute
their staple diet. From a religious point of view, it consists in
converting something they dare not eat into something they can eat.

Many, though not all, of their buffaloes are sacred, and their milk
may not be drunk. The reason why it may not be drunk anthropologists
may cast about to discover, but the Todas themselves do not know. All
that they know, and are concerned to know, is that things would somehow
all go wrong, if any one were foolish enough to commit such a sin.
So in the Toda temple, which is a dairy, the Toda priest, who is the
dairyman, sets about rendering the sacred products harmless. The dairy
has two compartments--one sacred, the other profane. In the first are
stored the sacred vessels, into which the milk is placed when it comes
from the buffaloes, and in which it is turned into butter and buttermilk
with the help of some of the previous brew, this having meanwhile been
put by in an especially sacred vessel. In the second compartment are
profane vessels, destined to receive the butter and buttermilk, after
they have been carefully transferred from the sacred vessels with the
help of an intermediary vessel, which stands exactly on the line
between the two compartments. This transference, being carried out
to the accompaniment of all sorts of reverential gestures and
utterances, secures such a profanation of the sacred substance as is
without the evil consequences that would otherwise be entailed. Thus
the ritual is essentially precautionary. A taboo is the hinge of the
whole affair.

And the tendency of such a negative type of religion is to pile
precautions on precautions. Thus the dairyman