Art. XVI.—On the Ante-Brahmanical Worship of the Hindús

Extract

A Singular coincidence exists between the history of the Greek word δαιμων, and the Sanskrit (bhúta). The Greek word is applied by Homer and early Grecian writers, as is well known, to the highest intelligences, and means one possessed of superior knowledge. The Sanskrit Bhúta is derived from the verb which signifies existence, and is applied to the elements of nature, and even to the great God Siva himself. But as δαιμων, with a change of religion, lost the sense of a deity, and came to be fused down to mean a demon or evil spirit, so now, in the Indian languages derived from the Sanskrit, Bhúta is entirely confined, in common speech, to a wandering ghost or malicious spirit. Again, as the term δαιμων was, among the Christian Greeks, frequently applied, in a bad sense, to the gods their fathers worshipped; so among the Brahmanized Hindús, the term Bhtita is applied contemptuously to the Ante-Brahmanical objects of worship. In all my intercourse, however, with those classes who worship these Bhútas, I never found them spontaneously apply this term to the objects of their adoration. They style them (deva) and (grámadeva), gods and village gods, but never (bhúta), devils. Yet again, they do not deny that the term Bhúta is applicable to these gods; but they make the acknowledgment in the spirit of those English South-American travellers, who, when robbed and stripped at a distance from their lodgings, and their horses taken from them, and most glad to employ the services of a despised animal to carry them home, would confess that they rode a donkey.