1883.] Rajendralala Mitra —On the Temples of Deoghar. 171 
the deity ; ‘ henceforth thou art not Byju, but Byjnath, and my temple 
shall be called by thy name.’ ”* 
Romantically as this story has been narrated by the charming writer, 
it is as thoroughly fictitious as the one that the Hindus recite, and utterly 
worthless as data for any historical inference. It cannot be under any 
circumstance more than three hundred years old; it is probably of a much 
more recent date. The Indian-corn, which the women of the black races 
are said to have cultivated, was unknown in this country before the 
Spaniards or the Portuguese brought it from America, and the black races 
could not possibly have known it in the olden time, or about the time 
when the temple was first built. There is no name for the corn in the 
Sanskrit language, and the vernacular names Janerd, Bhutta , Maided are 
all obviously foreign. In Janerd we have Rio Janeiro, and in Maided we 
recognize the Mahiz of the Island of Hayti, whence maize was first 
brought to Europe. It is true that the aboriginal races now cultivate 
it very largely, but that is not due to its being an aboriginal product, but 
to its being easily cultivated, and therefore better suited to the primitive 
husbandry of the Santals. The “three stones of aboriginal worship” are 
altogether a misidentification. As will be shown in the sequel, they 
are parts of a purely Hindu structure, attached to a Hindu temple, and 
used for Hindu ceremonials. It may be added that the tomb in which the 
mortal remains of Byju are alleged to be deposited is scarcely two hundred 
years old. Byju is no other then a clumsy copy of the Puranic Bhilla, 
the forester, and must go the way of his archetype. 
Some of the Puranas, without openly rejecting the story of Ravana, 
carry the date of Vaidyanatha’s advent at Deoghar to a much earlier period. 
It was not in the second, but in the first, age of the world, Satya Yuga or 
the “age of Truth,” when the gods of heaven had not yet settled down to 
their respective places, and jealousies and rivalry and dissensions were rife 
for precedence, that S'iva, claiming a higher rank than that of his father- 
in-law, Daksha, treated him with marked discourtesy at a public assembly. 
The patriarch resented this by not inviting him to a grand sacrifice, and Sati, 
the daughter of Daksha, failing in her expostulations with her father, com¬ 
mitted suicide, rather than continue to be known as the daughter of one 
who had reviled her divine husband. Overpowered by grief, S'iva, in a fit 
of frenzy, stuck the corpse of his wife on the point of his trident, and 
roamed about as a madman. The sight created a scandal, and nobody 
being able to approach and remonstrate with S'iva, Vishnu cut up the body 
with his discus into fifty-two parts, which fell on different parts of India. 
The heart fell at Deoghar, and thence that place attained its sanctity, and be¬ 
came known by the name of Uardapitha “the sanctuary of the heart.” 
* * Annals of Rural Bengal,’ pp. 191/. 
