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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.
Like the ghost in Hamlet, the angel that visited Jacob, and the destroying angels of Sodom, the Râkshasas always fly before the dawn. They invariably travel through the air and keep their souls in birds or trees—a fertile element in folk-lore which has been called by Major Temple “The Life Index.”47