secrated, of which each partakes, after which they chew the panŭ leaf. Next, before all the things placed in the centre of the room, the spiritual guide rehearses the common ceremonies of worship, addressing them to any one of the female deities who happens to be the guardian deity of this disciple. The vessels from which the company are to drink, and the offerings, are next consecrated: these vessels may be formed of earth, copper, brass, silver, gold, or stone, the cocoa-nut, or a human skull: but the latter is to be prefered. The spiritual guide then gives as much as a wine glass of spirits to each female, as the representative of the divine energy, and the men drink what they leave. At this time the spiritual guide declares, that in the sutyŭ yoogu the people were directed in their religious duties by the védŭs, in the trétǎ by the writings of the learned, in the dwapŭrů by the different pooranus, and, in the kulee yoogů, the tůntrus are the only proper guides to duty. As if well pleased with this sentiment, each one of the company now drinks two more glasses of the spirits. The disciple next worships each male and female separately, applying to them the names of Bhoirùvů and Bhoiruvee, titles given to Shivă and Doorga, and presents to each of them spirits, meat-offerings, garments, ornaments, &c.; after which the spiritual guide offers a burnt-sacrifice, with the flesh and other meat offerings, pouring on them, as they burn, clarified butter: the disciple also repeats the same ceremony. The eight females now anoint the disciple by sprinkling upon him, with the branches which were placed on the pan, spirits and water; and after mixing together the whole of the spirits, or spirits and water, from all the pans, the spiritual guide, with all the branches, again sprinkles the disciple, to whom he declares that he has now, for the good of his soul, instructed him, according to the commandment of the great god Shivů, in all the ceremonies belonging to the profession of a vamacharee; urging him, in practising these ceremonies, to keep his mind on Shivů, and that he will be happy after death: at the close, he causes him to drink the liquor thus mixed, repeating separate incantations. During his initiation he is not to drink so as to appear intoxicated, or to cause his mind to wander, but having habituated himself to a small quantity, he may take more, till he falls down in a state of intoxication; still however so as to rise again after a short interval, after which he continue may drinking the nectar, till he falls down completely overcome, and remains in this state of joy, thinking upon his guardian deity. He is now known as an Uvůdhōōtŭ, that is, as one who has renounced all secular affairs, and receives a new name (perhaps Anundŭ-nať’hů) or the joyous. He is to drink spirits with all of the same profession; to sleep constantly in a house of ill-fame, and to eat of every thing he pleases, and with all casts indiscriminately. The next thing, is to offer a burnt sacrifice; after which the spiritual guide and the guests are dismissed with preThese vamacharees sents, and the new disciple spends the night with an infamous female.

A

adore the sex, and carefully avoid offending a woman.

They also practise the most debasing

rites using the heads of persons who have been guilty of suicide, also when sitting on a dead body, and while naked and' in the presence of a naked female.-It might seem impossible to trace ceremonies gross as these to any principle except that of moral depravity; but the authors of this system attempt to reconcile it with the pursuit of future happiness: the reader is aware that the regular Hindoo theologians attribute all the vices to the passions, and consider their subjugation, or annihilation, as essential to final beatitude; they therefore aim at the accomplishment of this object by means of severe bodily austerities. The vamacharees profess to seek the same object, not by avoiding temptation, and starving the body, but by blunting the edge of the passions with excessive indulgence. They profess to triumph over the regular Hindoos, reminding them that their ascetics are safe only in forests, and while keeping a perpetual fast, but that they subdue their passions in the very presence of temptation.

Thus, that which to the Hindoo should be divine worship, is the great source of impiety and corruption of manners: and, instead of returning from his temple, or from religious services, improved in knowledge; grieved for his moral deficiencies, and anxious to cultivate a greater regard to the interests of morality and religion, his passions are inflamed, and his mind polluted to such a degree that he carries the pernicious lessons of the temple, or the festival, into all the walks of private life. His very religion becomes his greatest bane, and where he should have drank of the water of life, he swallows the poison that infallibly destroys him.

In conversation with a learned bramhun, in the year 1813, he acknowledged to the author, that, at present, reverence for the gods made no part of the attractions to the public festivals. One man celebrates a festival to preserve himself from disgrace, another to procure the applausThis bramhйn ines of his countrymen, and a third for the sake of the songs, dances, &c. stanced cases of images being made without any reference to the rules of the shastră. At one place, a Hindoo, having prepared an image, at an expense which he could not meet, permitted it to be broken, and its head, arms, and legs, to be trodden upon in the streets :-another, who had been thus disappointed, threw the image into the water; and a third, having made an enormous image, had fastened it to a cart, but on the first motion of the vehicle, the head of the idol had fallen off, and the rest of the image was permitted to lie in the street as a dead carI give these instances, to confirm what I have already said, that it is not devotion that leads the Hindoo to the temple, but a licentious appetite; and to afford another proof, that F

case.

idolatry always tends to sink, but never to raise its votaries. In the account of Kalee (p. 121) the reader will find a fact respecting the execution of two Hindoos, who, when under sentence of death, became Roman-catholics, in pure revenge upon Kalee, who did not, as she was believed to have done in many other cases, protect them in the act of robbery. One of the pundits who assisted me in this work, begged, if I mentioned this fact, that I would assure the English reader, that although this goddess assisted public robbers, she always informed them that they must suffer hereafter for their crimes, though she did assist them in their perpetration.

The Reverend Mr. Maurice seems astonished that a people so mild, so benevolent, so benignant as the Hindoos, who (quoting Mr. Orme) shudder at the very sight of blood,' should have adopted so many bloody rites. But are these Hindoos indeed so humane?-these men, and women too, who drag their dying relations to the banks of the river at all seasons, day and night, and expose them to the heat and cold in the last agonies of death, without remorse ;who assist men to commit self-murder, encouraging them to swing with hooks in their backs, to pierce their tongues and sides, to cast themselves on naked knives, to bury themselves alive,* throw themselves into rivers,† from precipices, and under the cars of their idols;-who murder their own children, by burying them alive, throwing them to the alligators, or hanging them up alive in trees for the ants and crows before their own doors,§ or by sacrificing them to the Gan

* Instances are not unfrequent, where persons afflicted with loathsome and incurable diseases, have caused themselves to be buried alive.”----Asiatic Researches, vol. vii. p. 257.

+ Mr. W. Carey, of Cutwa, in a letter to the author, dated the 4th November, 1814, says, "Two or three days ago I witnessed a scene more shocking than any I ever saw in this place: A poor weaver was brought here, and cast into the river, with a pan of water tied round his waist to make him sink; but providentially the river was shallow, and he was taken out, after being in the water a day and a night. Hearing of the circumstance, I went to see him, and found the poor man only affected with rheumatic pains. I had him brought to my house, but could not prevail on the unfeeling natives to carry him up till I procured an order from an officer of the police. I hope he will be restored to health in a fortnight, when he will return home, with some knowledge of the gospel. What adds to the horror of this narration, is, that the perpetrators of this intended murder were the mother and brother of this unfortunate Hindoo."

+ "A very singular practice prevails among the lowest tribes of the inhabitants of Berar and Gondwănă. Suicide is not unfrequently vowed by such persons in return for boons solicited from idols, and to fulfil his vow, the successful votary throws himself from a precipice named Kală-Bhoirŭvů, situated in the mountains between the Taptee and Nŭrmůda rivers. The annual fair held near that spot at the beginning of spring, usually witnesses eight or ten victims of this superstition."- --Asiatic Researches vol. vii. p. 257.

I fancy this is done when the child is born with bad omens, or is supposed to be afflicted by some evil spirit.

ges;-who burn alive, amidst savage shouts, the heart-broken widow, by the hands of her own son, and with the corpse of a deceased father;*-who every year butcher thousands of animals, at the call of superstition, covering themselves with their blood, consigning their carcases to the dogs, and carrying their heads in triumph through the streets?-Are these the 'benignant Hindoos!'--a people who have never erected a charity-school, an alms'-house, nor an hospital; who suffer their fellow creatures to perish for want before their very doors, refusing to administer to their wants while living, or to inter their bodies, to prevent their being devoured by vultures and jackals, when dead;-who, when the power of the sword was in their hands, impaled alive, cut off the noses, the legs, and arms, of culprits; and inflicted punishments exceeded only by those of the followers of the mild, amiable, and benevolent Booddhu in the Burman empire!+

* At Benares and near Buxar numerous brick monuments have been erected to perpetuate the memory of women who have been burnt alive with the bodies of their deceased husbands.

+ It is well known, that the Burmans are the followers of Booddhu, whose principal aim was to excite in mankind a horror of shedding blood, and of destroying animal life. The following facts will show how much huma

Mr.

nity there is among a people far exceeding the Hindoos in their care not to injure whatever contains life. F. Carey thus writes to his friends in Bengal: "I will now relate what has taken place in this single town of Rangoon since my residence in this country; which does not exceed four years. Some of the criminals I saw executed with my own eyes; the rest I saw immediately after execution. One man had melted lead poured down his throat, which immediately burst out from the neck, and various parts of the body. Four or five persons, after being nailed through their hands and feet to a scaffold, had first their tongues cut out, then their mouths slit open from ear to ear, then their ears cut off, and finally their bellies ripped open. Six people were crucified in the following manner: their hands and feet were nailed to a scaffold; their eyes were then extracted with a blunt hook; and in this condition they were left to expire; two died in the course of four days; the rest were liberated, but died of mortification on the sixth or seventh day. Four persons were crucified, viz.

not nailed but tied with their hands and feet stretched out at full length, in an erect posture, in which they were to remain till death; every thing they wished to eat was ordered them, with a view to prolong their lives and miIn cases like this, the legs and feet of the criminals begin to swell and mortify at the expiration of three or four days; some are said to live in this state for a fortnight, and expire at last from fatigue and mortification. Those which I saw were liberated at the end of three or four days. Another man had a large bamboo run

sery.

through his belly, which put an immediate end to his existence. Two persons had their bellies ripped up, just sufficient to admit of the protrusion of a small part of the intestines, and after being secured by the hands and feet at full stretch with cords, were placed in an erect posture upon bamboo rafters, and set adrift in the river, to float up and down with the tide for public view. The number of those who have been beheaded I do not exactly recollect; but they must be somewhere between twenty and thirty. One man was sawn to death, by applying the saw to the shoulder bone, and sawing right down until the bowels gushed out. One woman was beat to death with a large cudgel.----These are most of the punishments I have seen and heard of during my stay in this place, but many other instances happened during my absence, which I have not related. As for the crimes for which these punishments were inflicted, I shall only add, the crimes of some deserved death: some were of a trivial nature, and some of the victims were quite innocent."

and who very often, in their acts of pillage, murder the plundered, cutting off their limbs with the most cold-blooded apathy, turning the house of the murdered into a disgusting shambles !--Some of these cruelties, no doubt, arise out of the religion of the Hindoos, and are the poisoned fruits of superstition, rather than the effects of natural disposition: but this is equally true respecting the virtues which have been so lavishly bestowed on this people. At the call of the shastrů, the Hindoo gives water to the weary traveller during the month Voishakhů, but he may perish at his door without pity or relief from the first of the following month, no reward being attached to such an act after these thirty days have expired. He will make roads, pools of water, and build lodging-houses, for pilgrims, and travellers, but he considers himself as making a good bargain with the gods in all these transactions. It is a fact, that there is not a road in the country made by Hindoos except a few which lead to holy places, and had there been no future rewards held out for such acts of merit, even these would not have existed. Before the kulee-ydogŭ it was lawful to sacrifice cows, but the man who does it now,

is guilty of a crime as heinous as that of killing a bramhun: he may kill a buffaloe, however, and Doorga will reward him with heaven for it. A Hindoo, by any direct act, should not destroy an insect, for he is taught that God inhabits even a fly, but it is no great crime if he should permit even his cow to perish with hunger; and he beats it without mercy, though it be an incarnation of Bhŭgůvŭtee-it is enough, that he does not really deprive it of life, for the indwelling Brumhŭ feels no stroke but that of death. The Hindoo will utter false

hoods that would knock down an ox, and will commit perjuries so atrocious and disgusting, as to fill with horror those who visit the courts of justice; but he will not violate his shastrů by swearing on the waters of the Ganges.

Idolatry is often also the exciting cause of the most abominable frauds: Several instances are given in this volume: one will be found in p. 97, and another respecting an image found under ground by the raja of Nudeeya, in p. 160.*

Indeed keeping gods is even a trade among the Hindoos: the only difficulty to be overcome, is that of exciting attention to the image. To do this, the owner of the image frequently goes from village to village, to call the attention of the neighbourhood; he also persuades some one to proclaim, that he has been warned in a dream to perform vows to this image, or, he repeats to

* Plutarch says, that Romulus, when he instituted the Ludi Consuales, to surprize the Sabine virgins, gave out, that he had discovered the altar of the god Consus hid under ground, which discovery attracted great multitudes to the sacrifice,