The religious celebrations lasted three days, interspersed with feasts and other diversions, notably an acrobatic display by a performer who roused his audience to a frenzy of enthusiasm. At the beginning of each feast a priest called all the deities by name and executed the movements of a dance in their honour. These evolutions are an invitation to the divinities to take their place in the celebrations.
At dawn on the second day the priestess filled with cakes and fruit a toy boat hollowed out of the trunk of a banana-tree by some ingenious artisan. In this frail canoe a rag monkey was placed, squatting on its haunches in a very grotesque position. The boat was meant to commemorate the vessel which in former days came from China every three years to fetch the tribute exacted from a vassal state.
After this the roysterers fell upon the improvised temple and hacked it to pieces amongst general rejoicings.
The next day, by way of applying the closure to the festivities, the whole crowd, headed by the priest and priestess, marched to a neighbouring canal, taking the symbolical boat with them. While the orchestra poured forth an unmelodious symphony the lilliputian vessel was entrusted to the waters, in which it speedily filled and disappeared.
There are strong resemblances between this Cham ceremony and the celebrations in India which mark the changes of the monsoon. In this latter country travellers find the same gaily bedecked sheds, the same rude figures cut out of paper, and the same swing scene. The Hindus regard the backward and forward movement of the swing as a symbol of the movements of the seasons.
Most of the rites which obtain among the Cham, in fact, recall the ritual observances of the Vedic and Brahminic religions, of which the following are among the most characteristic features.
The place selected for the crowning act of sacrifice, "Devayajana," is always an open space, whether at a cross-roads or in an enclosure. The improvised temple is made of branches or clods of earth and is invariably destroyed by the worshippers after the solemn ceremony is over.
Each sacrifice is regarded as the conclusion of a treaty between the gods and mortals. The value of the offering is in proportion to the extent of the favours desired. Most sacrifices are for heat or rain, two necessaries of life without which neither health nor prosperity is possible.
The officiating priest and his bodyguard of acolytes are housed and fed at the expense of the "Yajamana," the individual for whose ultimate benefit the benevolence of the gods is solicited. I ought to add that the previous life and blamelessness of this person have nothing to do with the efficacy of the sacrifice. On the contrary, the only thing that matters is the exact, punctilious observance of the rite itself.
It is plain that intellect plays little part in these religious ceremonies. Throughout, each act is designed to fire the imagination and arouse the emotions, rather than carry conviction.