broke, the freshes of the rivers were greeted by the people with almost religious enthusiasm. They were marked by ritualistic bathing and water-sports. The Paripaaṭal contains long poems exclusively devoted to the description of the Vaiyai in spate; and the detailed accounts of the water-sports, the crowds, the gossip and scandal which marked the feasting, seem so modern and remind one of books having some spa or city on the Riviera as their background. The people who flocked to the river took with them prawns, fishes and crabs and dropped them in the river with cries of “Increase, Multiply”-polika, meaning that they should increase and multiply in the river, and that the river should be a source of fertility. They believed that this opportunity given to them to bathe in the waters of the Vaiyai was a special grace, and they prayed for the same grace in the next life.27 Young girls bathed early morning in the Vaiyai in the month of Tai (January), or in their local tanks or rivers, and prayed to Tirumaal in the belief that their penitential early morning baths in the chilly waters would merit them the grace of a loving husband.28 Superstition and Nature The material from which anthropologists and ethnologists may draw evidence for their theories on animism, fetishism, totemism and worship of the spirits of the dead, is plentiful in Cankam literature. There is evidence for snake worship, for tree-worship, for hill-worship. The predominant evidence is for animism, but that animism too is of a simplified kind. It seldom or never considers the tree as having a soul of its own, but it conceives a particular tree as the habitation of a god or a spirit, and even the number of indwelling gods are not multiplied but almost limited to the four regional gods, and Koṛṛavai attributed as the goddess of paalai, the fifth region. Awe and fear before the stronger manifestations of Nature, before thunderstorms, lightning, dark nights or dark. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 27Pari; 10, 85 ff. The Commentator says that the prawns, fishes and crabs were made of gold. 28 Pari; 11, 86, 115. |