WeRead
Powered by ReaderPub
Explore more books like this:
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.
All ghosts, as we shall see later on, have the power of lengthening themselves like the Naugaza, whom we have already mentioned. For this reason demons, as a rule, are of gigantic form, and many of the enormous fossil bones found in the Siwâlik Hills were confidently attributed to the Râkshasas, which reminds us of the story of the smith in Herodotus who found the gigantic coffin seven cubits long containing the bones of Orestes.46