This worship and appeal to Hindu deities appears to me to have gone on side by side with the proper religion of the Todas, but to have influenced it little. It shows how people of low culture make use of the gods of other races as well as of their own, and in the same way I believe that the Todas reverence the gods of Badagas, Kurumbas, or any other of the tribes with which they have dealings, and if asked point-blank if the gods of these people are their gods they will assent.
It is probable that Hinduism is now having more influence on the Todas than ever before, and, as I have already pointed out, I believe that the reverence to Swami and the frequent utterance of his name is a sign of the increasing influence of Hinduism, perhaps combined with that of Christianity.
Christianity has so far had no appreciable influence. The Church Missionary Zenana Society has for some years employed two catechists to work among the Todas, and one of them, Samuel, who by the kindness of the Society was allowed to act as my interpreter for a large part of my stay, ought to have been successful if earnestness and honesty are of any avail, but his efforts, carried on for ten years, had borne very little fruit.
In the whole of the mythology and ceremonial there are few features which suggest the probability of Christian influence, and the chief of these is the incident in the legend of the origin of mankind where woman is created from a rib taken from the right side of a man. It is very unlikely that this is a recent accretion to the legend, and, if it is due to Christian influence, I think it must have arisen long ago. We [[459]]know that, three centuries ago, priests visited the Todas and preached to them, and it is stated (see p. [720]) that one chose the Hebrew story of the creation for his lesson, and it may be that the incident, striking the fancy of the people, was incorporated into their own tradition of the origin of man. The resemblance between the Toda madnol and the Sabbath may also excite the suspicion that the former institution is founded on ideas borrowed from Christians or Jews. I think we may be confident that, if this has been the case, the borrowing took place very long ago. I hope to show in the last chapter that it is probable the Todas came from Malabar, and it is possible that their migration to the hills took place after the settlement of Christians or Jews in that district. If Christianity has affected the religious beliefs or practices of the general body of the Todas, I think it is certain that this influence has not been recent.
Magic and Religion
A word may be added, at the end of this chapter, on the relation between the magic and the religion of the Todas. I have already pointed out reasons for believing that the Toda religion is one in process of degeneration, and we must not therefore expect to find among this people material for the study of the evolution of religion from magic or for the method of divergence of the two from some original stem which was neither magic nor religion.
The chief interest of the Todas from this point of view is that they show how side by side with a relatively high form of religion there may exist a body of beliefs crystallised in magical formulæ which bear a very close resemblance to the formulæ of the religious ritual. Their aim and their general nature leave no doubt that the formulæ given in the later part of [Chap. XII] are magical in nature, and yet they show more distinct evidence of appeal to deities than is to be found in the definitely religious formulæ of the dairy. These magical formulæ of the Todas seem to show us a stage of magic in which religion has been called [[460]]to its aid. The sorcerer does not endeavour to effect his purpose merely by the belief in the efficiency of like producing like, or other ideas which dominate the lower forms of magic, but has called to his aid the power of the gods and uses a form of words almost identical with that used in the religious ritual. Magic and religion are here closely allied, but it is possible that this alliance is but one of the products of the degeneration to which I believe the Toda religion is subject. It is possible that we have here evidence that during the process of degeneration of religion, religion and magic may approach one another—an approach which recalls their common origin from those low beliefs and ideas of the savage to which the name of neither magic nor religion should perhaps be properly applied. [[461]]
[1] I do not intend by this to indicate my belief that these cairns are ancient Toda monuments. I only wish to point out that one of the arguments which has been directed against this view is probably not valid. I shall return to this point in a future chapter. [↑]