86 Wilber Theodore Elmore 



ately stood before her. " My brotlier," she said, " if you will help 

 me in this trouble I will see to it that you receive a sheep as tall 

 as the sky and a pile of rice as high as a palm tree." 



This generous offer induced Potu Razu to promise to do what- 

 ever she required. Renuka directed him to spread his tongue over 

 the ground as far as the kingdom of the Rakshasas extended, and 

 not to let one drop of their blood fall to the ground. Thus the 

 propagation of the Rakshasas was stopped and the battle was 

 won. This is the explanation of the offering of a sheep and a 

 pile of rice to Potu Razu whenever the village deity is worshiped. 



This legend makes Renuka, the mother of one of Vishnu's 

 avatars, to be the source of the Saktis, and so connects them very 

 directly with the Hindu pantheon. The aboriginal tribes are 

 spoken of as Rakshasas in the Ramayana. It may be that some 

 part of the Dravidian people assisted the Aryans in overcoming 

 such tribes, and that this story, which certainly gives a most 

 honorable place to Dravidian Saktis, was the result.^" 



A variant of the latter part of the story comes more directly to 

 the matter of the origin of the Saktis. It relates that when 

 Renuka was engaged in her war with the Rakshasas and dis- 

 covered that from every drop of blood which fell to the ground, 

 sixty thousand new Rakshasas arose, she went in her perplexity to 

 the three gods, Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva. They appeared to her 

 in the form of Brahmans and heard her story. They admitted that 



20 Moor, The Hindu Pantheon, Madras, 1864, p. 120. " It is certainly 

 likely that at some remote period, probably not long after the settlement 

 of the Aryan races in the plains of the Ganges, a body of invaders, headed 

 by a bold leader, and aided by the barbarous hill tribes, may have attempted 

 to force their way into India as far as Ceylon. The heroic exploits of the 

 chief would naturally become the theme of songs and ballads, the hero 

 himself would be deified, the wild mountaineers and foresters of the 

 Vindhya and neighboring hills, who assisted him, would be politically con- 

 verted into monkeys, and the powerful but savage aborigines of the south 

 into many-headed ogres and blood-lapping demons (called Rakshasas). 

 These songs would at first be the property of the Kshatriya or fighting 

 caste whose deeds were celebrated; but the ambitious Brahmans, who aimed 

 at religious and intellectual supremacy, would soon see the policy of collect- 

 ing the rude ballads, which they could not suppress, and moulding them to 

 their own purposes." 



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