Tiger-worship among the Gonds.
Among the Gonds tiger-worship assumes a particularly disgusting form. At marriages among them, a terrible apparition appears of two demoniacs possessed by Bâgheswar, the tiger god. They fall ravenously on a bleating kid, and gnaw it with their teeth till it expires. “The manner,” says Captain Samuells, who witnessed the performance, “in which the two men seized the kid with their teeth and killed it was a sight which could only be equalled on a feeding day in the Zoological Gardens or a menagerie.”[38]