128 Wilder Theodore Elmore 



he leaves it on the boundaries, it is always with great honor, and 

 in the hope that the spirit will not come again into the village. 



It is undoubtedly true that the Dravidians have some measure of 

 fetishism in their religious ideas. ^^ There is no religion but 

 what has at some stage possessed considerable fetishism, and 

 strangely enough, those which are usually considered the more 

 advanced religious systems have a large amount of fetishism in 

 their corrupted forms, if not in their original conceptions. It is 

 indeed striking, however, that the fundamental ideas of the Dra- 

 vidians, as shown in their worship and the stories of their gods, 

 contain so little fetishism, which is commonly thought to be an 

 invariable feature in primitive religion.^^ 



Dravidian Animism. The term animism has been chosen to 

 represent the peculiar religious ideas of the Dravidians.^" It was 



1^ Cf. the story of Kulagollamma, page 74. I once visited a village 

 where there were no Brahmans, and noticed that Ramaswami's temple 

 was empty. In answer to my enquiries the people laughed and said, " Oh 

 Ramaswami did not send us any rain last year, so we got tired of him 

 and threw him into the cactus." Ramaswami is a Hindu god who has 

 been largely adopted by the Dravidians. He has never taken a very strong 

 hold on the people. There is no danger that the Dravidian village deity 

 will ever be thus thrown away. 



18 On the entire subject see Monler-Williams, Brahmanism and Hin- 

 duism, p. 340; F. Max Miiller, Lectures on the Origin of Religion, London, 

 1891, Lect. n, pp. 54 sq. 



20 Madras Census Report, 1891, Ch. HI, p. 88. " The term * animistic ' was 

 suggested by the Census Commission to denote the religion of those forest 

 and hill tribes whose religious beliefs show no trace of orthodox Hinduism 

 In 1881 this religion was called ' aboriginal,' an expression to which excep- 

 tion has been taken on the ground that there are many aboriginal tribes 

 who are recognized to be Hindus by religion. But the term ' animistic ' 

 is equally open to objection in that there are many people invariably recog- 

 nized as Hindus whose real religion is almost pure animism. I take 

 ' animism ' to mean a belief in the existence of souls, with the addition 

 that after death the soul remains in the neighbdrhood where it dwelt when 

 incarnate, and is active for good and evil. The souls of dead ancestors 

 must be worshiped and provided with sacrifices of animals and offerings 

 of other kinds of food, or otherwise evil will befall the members of the 

 family to whom the soul belonged." 



The " people invariably recognized as Hindus " mentioned in this quota- 

 tion are the Dravidians, almost exclusively. We have seen, however, that 



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