WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
The Popular Religion and Folk-Lore of Northern India, Vol. 1 (of 2) cover

The Popular Religion and Folk-Lore of Northern India, Vol. 1 (of 2)

Chapter 107: Worship of Worthies.
Open in WeRead

About This Book

A systematic survey of popular religious beliefs and folk traditions across northern India, tracing how nature spirits, village and heroic godlings, disease deities, and cults of the sainted and malevolent dead shape rural practice. The author compiles customs, legends, rituals and local cultic forms, highlights the assimilation of major deities with indigenous practices, and documents magical usages and everyday superstitions. Organized in thematic chapters, the study blends ethnographic observation with citations and examples to reveal patterns of worship, the roles of ritual specialists, and the social functions of these popular cults.

Worship of Worthies.

From this family worship of deceased relations, the transition to the special worship of persons of high local reputation in life, or who have died in some remarkable way, is easy. The intermediate links are the Sâdhu and the Satî, and the worship finally culminates in a creed like that of the Jainas, who worship a pantheon of deified saints, that of the Lingâyat worship of Siva incarnated as Chambasâpa, or the godlike weaver Kabîr of the Kabîrpanthis. The lowest phase of all is the worship by the Halbas of Central India of a pantheon of glorified distillers.15