The Hos of Chutia Nâgpur have a similar festival, the Desauli held in January, “when the granaries are full of grain, and the people are, to use their own expression, ‘full of devilry!’ They have a strange notion that at this period men and women are so overcharged with vicious propensities that it is absolutely necessary for the safety of the person to let off steam by allowing for the time full vent to the passions. The festival, therefore, becomes a sort of Saturnalia, during which servants forget their duty to their masters, children their reverence for their parents, men their respect for women, and women all notions of gentleness, modesty, and delicacy; they become raging Bacchantes. It opens with a sacrifice to Desauli of three fowls, a cock and two hens, one of which must be black, and offered with some flowers of the Palâsa tree (Butea frondosa), bread made from rice flour and sesamum seeds. The sacrifice and offering are made by the village priest, if there be one, or if not by any elder of the village who possesses the necessary legendary lore; and he prays that during the year they are going to enter on they and their children may be preserved from all misfortune and sickness, and that they may have seasonable rain and good crops. Prayer is also made in some places for the souls of the departed. At this period an evil spirit is supposed to infest the locality, and to get rid of it, men, women, and children go in procession round and through every part of the village with sticks in their hands, as if beating for game, singing a wild chant and vociferating loudly, till they feel assured that the bad spirit must have fled, and they make noise enough to frighten a legion. These religious ceremonies over, the people give themselves up to feasting, drinking immoderately of rice-beer till they are in a state of wild ebriety most suitable for the purpose of letting off steam.”80

With these survivals of perhaps the most primitive observances of the races of Northern India we may close this survey of their religion and folk-lore. To use Dr. Tylor’s words in speaking of savage religions generally, “Far from its beliefs and practices being a rubbish heap of miscellaneous folly, they are consistent and logical in so high a degree as to begin, as soon as even roughly classified, to display the principles of their formation and development; and these principles prove to be essentially rational, though working in a mental condition of intense and inveterate ignorance.”81