Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/270

in Coimbatore had no traditions or beliefs regarding them, except vaguely that they denoted burials; but the Rev. Henry Baker, of the Travancore Mission, informed me that the same kind of jars occur in the Travancore low country, and are there called Mănchǎra, "earth-jars", generally covered with heavy slabs, and containing pieces of bone and iron. There, however, the natives say they contain the remains of sacrificed virgins, and that all the petty Rajahs in times past used to sacrifice virgins on their boundaries to protect them, and confirm treaties with neighbouring chiefs. The girls were buried in these jars on the boundaries, but whether buried alive or killed previously—as Mr. Baker, from the pieces of iron found with the bones, conjectured might have been the case—there was no tradition to show. Analogies, however, would indicate that the burial of only living victims would make the charm firm and good. These jars, too, have been often found in the adjacent province of Malabar.^[1]

M. J. Walhouse.

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1. An instance of living entombment in pots is mentioned in Mr. Bent's Journeys in Mashonaland. There, in Altoko's country, the birth of twins is held unnatural, and the "unfortunate infants are put into one of their big pots, with a stone on the top, and left to their fate" (p. 277).