but somehow or other accepted as inviolable by them and known as stri-āchāra (lit. female custom)' performed by women before the Brahmans officiated,6 and the same author maintains elsewhere that goddesses have been accorded (in folk-custom presumably) a higher position than the gods. According to the Mahabharata a matrilineal system survived in medieval India in the kingdom of Mahishmati about the Narbadā river, where the women had liberty to choose a plurality of husbands, and among the Arattas, somewhere apparently in the Punjab, 'whose heirs are their sisters' children, not their own'. With the exception of the Nambudris, who follow the Rigveda, Brahmans in southern India, many of whom at any rate follow the Samaveda, Yajurveda or Atharvaveda, are accustomed to marry the daughter of their mother's brother. This is opposed to the letter and spirit of the Brahmanic code and is clearly suggestive of a survival of a matrilineal system; orthodoxy would appear to enjoin the patrilineal prohibition of such marriages. The Pandyan dynasty seems to have been originally matrilineal, as Tamil poems are said to allude to its founder as a woman, and the tradition recorded by Megasthenes⁷ is that it was founded by a daughter of Heracles, while Pliny describes the people as 'gens Pandae, sola Indorum regnata foeminis'.⁸

The generally accepted view of the Hindu religion, or society, used to regard it as originating in Aryan invaders of about 1500 B.C. who came in with a higher civilization and a fairer skin to find the great peninsula inhabited by dark-skinned barbarians on whom they imposed the religion of the vedas. This view can no longer be maintained, and the doubts cast on it appear to be confirmed by discoveries including that of a figure of Shiva among the remains at Mohenjodaro, while Sir John Marshall has clearly shown that the pre-Aryan religion of the Indus Valley involved a cult of the bull, and of the snake-typical Mediterranean cults, to be found in Crete - and also of phallic symbols, including 'ring' and baetylic stones, which are probably all part of the soul-fertility cult which is associated throughout India with menhirs, dolmens, and a megalithic culture generally; indeed, Heine-Geldern connects the megalithic Mycenean theatre with India and so with the Far East and the Pacific Islands. It has been pointed out with some aptness that in modern Hinduism only those elements of vedic rites have survived which are essentially social, such as the marriage ceremonies; the argument being

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⁶Sarkar, Folk Element in Hindu Culture, p. 231.

⁷ McCrindle, Ancient India as described by Megasthenes and Arrian, pp. 37, 206, and Pintian's note on Pliny, VII, ii, in the edition of 1669, Vol. I, pp. 402, 403.

⁸ Nat. Hist., VI, XX,