t to speak
of strangers unfortunate enough to fall into their hands. Among the
pure Gonds is found the practice of carrying an axe, which is the sign
of their religious devotion to the sacrifice-god.[7] The favorite
religious practice used to be to take a prisoner alive, force him to
bow before the god-stone, and at the moment when he bent his head, to
cut it off. To this and to self-defence against other gods (wild
beasts) the hatchet is devoted, while for war are used the bow and
knife. One particular celebration of the Gonds deserves special
notice. They have an annual feast and worship of the snake. The
service is entirely secret, and all that is known
of it is that it is of esoteric, perhaps phallic character. Both at
the sun-feast and snake-feast[8] licentious and bacchanalian worship
are combined, and the latter trait is also the chief feature of
wedding and funeral sports. In the former case (the natives of the
same tribe intermarry, but with the same pretence of running off with
the bride that is found in the Hindu ritual)[9] there is given a
wedding feast by the bridegroom's father, and the feast ends with a
_causerie de lundi_ (the favorite drink of the Gonds is called
_lundi_); while on the latter occasion there is a mourning feast, or
wake, which also ends in general drunkenness.

The Khonds: Even more striking is the religion of the Khonds. Their
chief rite is human sacrifice to the earth-goddess,[10] Tari; but,
like the Gonds, they worship the sun as chief divinity. Other gods
among them are the river-god, rain-god, spring, wealth, hill-god, and
smallpox-god. All their religious feasts are excuses for excess both
in drinking and otherwise. One of their beliefs is that there is a
river of hell, which flows around a slippery rock, up which climbs the
one that would escape torment. Their method of sacrificing a human
victim is to put him into the cleft of a tree, where he is squashed,
or into fire. They seem to have an odd objection to shedding blood for
this purpose, and in this respect may be compared with the Thugs.
Another very interesting trait is the religion which is intertwined
with business, and its peculiar features. Victims offered either to
the sun or to the war-god serve to mark boundary lines. Great is the
patience with which
these victims, called _merias_, are waited for. The sacrificer
captures fit specimens when they are young, and treats them with
particular kindness till they are almost