The idol is a carved block of wood, with a hideous face,
painted black, and a distended blood-red mouth. On festival days
the throne of the image is placed on a tower sixty feet high,
moving on wheels. Six long ropes are attached to the tower, by
which the people draw it along. The priests and their attendants
stand round the throne on the tower, and occasionally turn to the
worshippers with songs and gestures. While the tower moves along
numbers of the devout worshippers throw themselves on the ground,
in order to be crushed by the wheels, and the multitude shout in
approbation of the act, as a pleasing sacrifice to the idol. Every
year, particularly at two great festivals in March and July,
pilgrims flock in crowds to the temple. Not less than seventy or
eighty thousand people are said to visit the place on these
occasions, when all castes eat together.
CASTES
The division of the Hindus into classes or castes, with fixed
occupations, existed from the earliest times. It is supposed by
some to have been founded upon conquest, the first three castes
being composed of a foreign race, who subdued the natives of the
country and reduced them to an inferior caste. Others trace it to
the fondness of perpetuating, by descent from father to son,
certain offices or occupations.
The Hindu tradition gives the following account of the origin of
the various castes: At the creation Brahma resolved to give the
earth inhabitants who should be direct emanations from his own
body.
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