Spread Of Cults Research Articles

La devoción de la Virgen del Sagrario de la Catedral de Toledo en Hispanoamérica. Difusión y culto durante la Edad Moderna a través de sus "verae effigiei"

The importance of verae effigiei in the religious and artistic sphere during the Modern Age was enormous and motivates us to scrutinize a fairly unknown case: the Virgen del Sagrario of Toledo Cathedral. Based on unpublished documentation preserved in the Archivo Capitular, and the analysis of several visual sources (canvases and engravings), this paper offers an account of how this cult spread in New Spain during the aforementioned period. Furthermore, we have been able to determine the impact of the inauguration in 1675 of the new throne, designed by Pedro de la Torre and Francisco Bautista and later realized by Virgilio Fanelli.

Artistic, Commercial, and Confessional Exchanges between Venetian Crete and Western Europe: The Multiple Lives of an Icon of the Virgin and Child from Harvard Art Museums

In the collections of the Harvard Art Museums there is an icon of the Virgin and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Roch. Although a typical product of Cretan icon painting of the turn of the sixteenth century, the icon stands out from similar contemporary artworks due to its unusual subject matter and materiality. The iconographic analysis of the icon places it at the intersection of the Latin and Byzantine traditions and suggests that it was intended as a votive offering against the plague, featuring one of the earliest depictions of the anti-plague saint, Roch of Montpellier in Eastern Orthodox art. Examination of the verso of the icon further underscores the Western European associations of the panel. The presence of an elaborate incised design on the back side of the icon suggests that the wooden panel originated from a reused piece of furniture, in all probability, a fifteenth-century Italian chest. With this case study as a point of reference, this article discusses the commercial, artistic, and cross-confessional exchanges that took place in the ethnically and culturally pluralistic societies of Venice and its Mediterranean colonies, including the trans-confessional spread of cults, the dissemination of artistic trends, as well as the mutual transfer of artworks and objects of prestige, such as icons and chests.

Patterns of Integration: A Network Perspective on Popular Religious Connections in China’s Lower Yangzi, 1150–1350

The spread of cults from their original homelands in the Song dynasty (960–1279) created crisscrossing ties between local communities and fostered social and cultural integration in Chinese society that transcended class and geographic boundaries. Scholars have produced numerous case studies on these translocal cults and their implications, but the pattern of connections across space created by these cults is yet to be explored. Using the data collected from local gazetteers that have survived from the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties, this article takes a bird’s-eye view of the spatial distribution of popular cults in China’s Lower Yangzi region between 1150 and 1350 and employs the method of network analysis to study the pattern of connections formed through these religious ties. It reveals seven statistically significant subregional clusters of popular cults and three complementary mechanisms that tied these clusters together. It argues that integration across space was achieved not only through the spread of a cult and the attendant formation of a unified religious culture, but also through a multitude of less prominent cults which were each confined in their geographical scope of influence but collectively created a crisscrossing web of ties linking one subregional cluster to another. Host to a diversity of popular deities that were each associated with a different subregional cluster, the prefectural seats and the Southern Song capital Lin’an played a critical role in the social and cultural integration by providing a welcoming meeting ground for divergent communities of devotees.

Образ Аполлона в философском творчестве Акима Волынского

For the significant part of his creative life A.K. Volynsky turned to the image of Apollo, first, as a cultural metaphor rooted in the famous Nietzsche dyad of Apollonian/Dionysian and characterizing a certain type of culture and way of thinking. The critic sees the guarantee of the birth of a new Russia in over­coming the eternal Russian Dionysism and the affirmation of Apollo. The aca­demic interest in the figure of Apollo was inspired by Volynsky’s activities in the field of theatre and ballet criticism. Volynsky refers to the ballet itself as formalized plastic art to the “kingdom of Apollo”. In the later works of Volyn­sky, Apollo acquires a new function, personifying a historically specific civiliza­tion – Hyperborea, that he considered in the spirit of the Arctic hypothesis fash­ionable in those years, as the cradle of the Aryan civilization. This is where the Hyperboreans, not yet divided into nations, expanded into Europe and be­came the ancestors of many peoples. To establish the directions of their expan­sion, Volynsky draws on Apollo cult spread history, a god whose image has been associated with Hyperborea since ancient times; he traces the stages of trans­formation of his image on Greek land – from the “heavenly commander” to the god of purity, clarity, measure, order. In the cult of Apollo, the critic dis­covers Semitic features and the memory of the original Hyperborean mono­theism. According to Volynsky, it was the Semites who managed to preserve the features of the most ancient ancestors of European peoples – the Hyperbore­ans, as well as monism as a fundamental principle of their thinking. In the spirit of Russian cosmism, the thinker prophesies about the coming era of the “new Apollo” – a man of integral consciousness and universal rationality, who will live forever.

Understanding and Illustrating the Influence of the Cult of St Chad of Lichfield

AbstractModern‐day activity relating to the veneration of the Anglo‐Saxon saint Chad is concentrated on two sites: the cathedral at Lichfield where he was buried in 672, and the cathedral in Birmingham which has housed his relics since the middle of the nineteenth century. The geographical extent to which his cult spread in the 800 years between his death and the dispersal of his relics at the time of the Reformation have not, however, been explored in any detail. This article collates a range of evidence types that exist for the saint, including the hagiographic texts of his life, material culture from archaeological excavations and extant buildings, parish church dedications, and place‐name evidence. This evidence base is used to build up a comprehensive picture of Chad's influence from the time Bede described his life and death in his Ecclesiastical History until the Reformation, highlighting significant periods in the shrine's history. The use of GIS techniques to record, analyse and illustrate the range of evidence types allows the patterns and distributions and their significance to be demonstrated cartographically, thus revealing the reach of Chad's cult throughout the Middle Ages.

Recruitment to Elective Cults: Network Structure and Ecology

During the first and second centuries of the Common Era the Christ cult spread from rural Palestine to the large cities of the Empire. This article draws insights from social network theory and from epidemiology, arguing that the Christ cult was not a simple contagion, spread by simple contact, but a ‘complex contagion’ that required persuasion, especially because adherence to the Christ cult entailed potential social costs and demanded high signalling costs.

Ptolemaic political activities on the west coast of Hellenistic Asia Minor had a significant impact on the local spread of the Isiac cults: A spatial network analysis.

During the reign of the first Ptolemaic kings in Egypt, mainly in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE, the Egyptian cults related to the divine couple of Isis and Sarapis (i.e. the Isiac cults) spread successfully from Egypt to ports and coastal cities of the ancient Mediterranean. The discussion on the topic of the factors involved in the process of the early spread of these cults outside Egypt is still open and, so far, the research in this area has been conducted mainly by using established historiographical methods. However, these methods are limited when dealing with the interplay among different variables involved in complex historical processes. This article aims to overcome these limits by using a quantitative spatial network analysis. The results of our previous published research, which focused on a quantitative evaluation of the impact of individual factors on the early spread of the Isiac cults across the ancient Aegean Islands, suggest that the process was promoted by military and commercial activities of the Ptolemaic dynasty, and that the Ptolemaic military operations were the most influential factor. Following these results, this article focuses on the early spread of the Isiac cults on the west coast of Hellenistic Asia Minor, i.e. the region which the Ptolemies attempted to control in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE. The statistically significant results presented in this article support the hypothesis that the Ptolemaic political engagement in Asia Minor had a positive impact on the early spread of the Isiac cults. The results also suggest that the activities of the Seleucid dynasty, a political rival of the Ptolemies, in the area of interest could have constituted an immunological factor limiting the spread of the Isiac cults further to the eastern parts of Asia Minor.

Ptolemaic military operations were a dominant factor in the spread of Egyptian cults across the early Hellenistic Aegean Sea.

Early in the Ptolemaic era, Egyptian cults, particularly those of Isis and Sarapis, spread successfully to ports across the ancient Aegean Sea. Leading researchers in the field claim that the spread of these cults was influenced by multiple factors, ones that were mainly economic or political in character. However, the question of which factors had more weight or impact than others in the process of the early spread of Egyptian cults has not yet been answered in academic discussion. This could be related to the fact that the issue of the spread of religious innovations in the ancient Mediterranean has been addressed mainly by established historiographical methods such as the collection and critical analysis of archaeological and literary sources. Hypotheses and conclusions derived from these methods are, however, often unable to reflect the complexity of historical processes. A possible solution can be found in supplementing this established methodological apparatus by formalized methods, e.g. the coding of relevant datasets, statistics, geospatial modeling, and network analysis. To be able to compare the possible impacts of different factors on the spread of Egyptian cults in the Aegean Sea region, we 1) constructed a model of the ancient maritime transportation network as a platform for quantitative analysis, 2) transformed selected factors of possible influence into georeferenced parameters of the network, and 3) defined a mathematical model that allowed us to determine which parameters of the network explain the spatial dissemination of archaeological evidence connected to Egyptian cults. The results suggest that the most significant correlation is between the placement of Ptolemaic garrisons and the distribution of Egyptian temples and artefacts in the early Hellenistic Aegean Sea region. The interpretation would be that Egyptian military forces potentially played a significant role in the spread of Egyptian cults.

Imagining Rāhula in Medieval Japan

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Among the many koshiki associated with the Kamakura-period revival of the old Nara schools is the koshiki ..., a liturgy that pays homage to Sakyamuni's son, Rahula (Jp. ?? or Ragora ? ??). Although clerics belonging to the Nara schools created and performed many different koshiki during this time, attention to the koshiki in particular sheds light on the monastic goals and values shared by these groups, especially those committed to the revival of the vinaya and the return to Indian practices such as devotion to Sakyamuni and his disciples. This article will describe and analyze the koshiki, addressing not only its use and content, but also its place in the religious life of medieval Japan. Ultimately I will argue that the text's author, Yuishin ?? (dates unclear), presented Rahula both as a model for young novices and as a savior figure capable of saving sentient beings.Rahula Veneration in Medieval NaraThe koshiki, which venerates the Buddha's son, is one of only several koshiki that honor disciples of the Buddha. The others that fall into this category include the Juroku rakan koshiki ?????? (Koshiki on the sixteen arhats) and the Anan koshiki ???? (Koshiki on Ananda). As the other articles in this issue demonstrate, there were many categories of koshiki created in medieval Japan. More visible categories of koshiki include those that celebrate Sakyamuni himself, including his birth, teachings, final nirvana, relics, and so on; those that honor particular Buddhas, bodhisattvas, heavenly beings, and kami (there are scores that fall into this category); those that praise eminent monks; those that mark particular ritual occasions or goals of Buddhist practice; and those that commemorate particular texts (such as the Lotus Sutra, the Heart Sutra, the Ullambana Sutra, the Brahma Net Sutra, the Abhidharma Kosa Sastra, and so on).In some ways the koshiki may appear an unusual or marginal text for, as Sekiguchi (1998) points out, there is little evidence that widespread cults to the Buddha's son, Rahula, ever existed in Japan. Veneration of the arhats as a group did become popular in Japan, especially within Zen lineages. In the Kamakura period, devotion to the sixteen arhats became popular, especially among Zen groups, and in the Edo period, we see the spread of cults to the five hundred arhats as well (Mross 2007, 20). Although Rahula was commonly depicted in devotional images of the arhats, it was extremely rare for such images to feature Rahula as a stand-alone figure. Within the context of the medieval revival of the old Nara schools, however, rites honoring Rahula appear to have reached a certain level of popularity. Today two known copies of the koshiki are extant: one belonging to the archives of Toshodaiji ????, with a postscript stating that it was copied during the fifth month of 1312, and another held in the archives of Todaiji's ??? library. According to its postscript, this second version was copied in the year 1315. There are also a handful of related texts found in Ritsu-school circles: notable here are the kuyo no gi ????? (Ceremony for making offerings to Rahula), copied at Saidaiji ??? in 1290, and the ko no hossoku ????? (Procedures for the koshiki on Rahula), held at Shomyoji ??? and dating to the Kamakura period. These texts also make mention of separate, relevant works, such as a hyobyaku ?? (a chanted text stating the intent of a given liturgy) in honor of the ko kuyo and a kada (Sk. gatha) called Raun (Sekiguchi 1998, 4-5). Taken together, the survival of these various texts suggest that priests active in Nara circles-at places like Toshodaiji, Todaiji, Saidaiji, and Saidaiji's Kanto temple Shomyoji-actively promoted the veneration of Rahula using koshiki and related kuyo during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.Indeed, references to these rites appear in a number of historical records as well. …

The Cult of St. Daniel the Stylite Among the Russian Princes of the Rurik Dynasty

The influence of Grand Princess Euphrosyne (second wife of Prince Roman Mstislavovitch) explains the appearance among the Galician-Volhynian princes of Christian names which were unusual and unique for the Rurikides. This is the name Daniel, which was later included into the name list of the Moscow princes. This name spread among the princes due to the expansion of the cult of St Daniel the Stylite and the rising interest in the attributes of Stylitism. This can be seen in sphragistics and in the numerous architectural monuments of Galician-Volhynian Rus' of the 13th–early 14th century. Thanks to the family links between the Galician-Volhynian and the Vladimir-Suzdal princes, this cult spread in the North-Eastern Rus' and later to Moscow. The fact that Euphrosyne of Galicia was the daughter of Basileus Isaak II explains the unexpected rise of interest in Stylitism among the princes of Rus' and their milieu. According to Niketas Choniates, Emperor Isaak II especially sympathized with the Stylites and the ascetics and patronized them. Thus he astonished his contemporaries, since the Stylites had lost the influence over the emperors that they had exerted at the time of iconoclasm. The Byzantine hagiography concerning Sts. Daniel the Stylite and Leo the Great Tsar explains the connection between the names of Daniel and Leo among the descendants of Roman Mstislavich. Daniel the Stylite was the spiritual father and the main adviser of Emperor Leo I. Apparently this relationship was reflected in the names of the father and the son, the Galician-Volhynian princes Daniel Romanovich and Lev Danilovich.

O podrijetlu i najranijem kultu zadarskog zaštitnika Sv. Krševana

Polazeći od otvorenog pitanja povijesnosti akvilejskog mučenika i zadarskoga sveca-zaštitnika Sv. Krševana (Krizogona), autor nudi pregled ključnih izvora o njegovu najranijem kultu na akvilejskom području u razdoblju između vremena njegova pogubljenja početkom IV. st. i legendarnog prijenosa njegovih relikvija u Zadar sredinom VII. st. Oslanjajući se na – u recentnoj historiografiji prihvaćenu – pretpostavku prema kojoj je prvotno središte štovanja Sv. Krševana bilo u mjestu San Canzian d'Isonzo u neposrednoj okolici Akvileje, autor u svjetlu novije literature razmatra niz poznatih pisanih svjedočanstva poput tzv. Jeronimskog martirologija, kasnoantičkih hagiografskih legenda Passio S. Anastasiae i Passio Cantianorum, podsjećajući na mogućnosti njihova tumačenja u svjetlu veze s lokalnim arheološkim i epigrafičkim svjedočanstvima.

Travel and Religion in Antiquity ed. by Philip A. Harland (review)

Reviewed by: Travel and Religion in Antiquity ed. by Philip A. Harland Dietmar Neufeld Philip A. Harland , ed. Travel and Religion in Antiquity. Studies in Christianity and Judaism/Études sur le christianisme et le judaïsme series 21 . Waterloo : Wilfrid Laurier University Press , 2011 . Pp. vi + 289 . CDN $85.00 . ISBN 9781554582228 . Religion and travel intersect in significant ways for a large proportion of our world populations. Personalized statuettes, amulets, sacred books, acts of piety, dress, and ritualized behaviours are part and parcel of what we pack into our suitcases as we move from place to place. The destabilizing strangeness of a new location is offset by the comforting familiarity of one’s religious orientation. Moreover, it is not uncommon for moderns to travel governed by specific motives in mind—hiking the Santiago de Compostela, making the pilgrimage to Mecca, and travelling to exotic locales for cross-cultural experiences. Poems, songs, confessions, and anecdotes recounting personal experiences of religion on the road are not uncommon. Like moderns, so also the ancients understood only too well the intersections between travel and religion. The fascinating chapters in Travel and Religion in Antiquity represent the lively debate and interaction of a seminar on the topic of religion and travel that began in 2005 under the auspices of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies. The objectives of the book are clear. The programmatic introductory essay by Philip A. Harland sets the tone and agenda of the current volume, and despite its five-part structure, the book exhibits coherence in addressing the realities of travel and the many discourses of [End Page 404] travel in the religious lives of ancients. Indeed, the volume systematically considers the ways in which mobility intersected with the religious lives of the denizens of Rome. Given that the topic of travel is vast, one gets a sense of the parameters of the debate but also finds a fair degree of unanimity on the circumstances in people’s religious lives that were impacted by travel. Moreover, since travel and religion are multifaceted and complex social phenomena, depending on group, person, education, and social location, the volume exhibits a multidisciplinary approach to the topic. A clear sense emerges not only of the complex nature of the topic of mobility and religion but also of ways to deal with the topic methodologically and the outcome depending on perspectives. While the volume contains 5 distinct parts, 12 chapters, and 11 authors, there is a certain uniformity of style even though it is a collection of essays. As a whole, the volume reads well with few, if any, disjunctions in the manner of presentation. As Harland notes, the volume is organized around five overlapping areas where religion and travel intersect: travel related to honouring deities, including travel to festivals, oracles, and healing sanctuaries; travel to promote the worth of a god or the pre-eminence of a way of life, including the spread of cults or movements; travel to explore and encounter foreign people and cultures; migration because of forced relocation, war, or the search for a better life; and travel to engage in work (5). Four chapters deal with honouring the gods while on the road. Steven Muir considers ancient evidence where home and civic religion continued to be experienced while on the road, albeit in different form. The gods offered protection, continued to recognize the pious devotee from back home, and continued to manifest themselves to the travellers through omens and theophany. Fixed sacrifices and portable shrines along the road guaranteed that devotees would not be abandoned or forgotten by the gods. Susan Haber explores concerns of purity related to Judeans and Galileans attending the festivals at the temple in Jerusalem. Jesus along with followers and other pilgrims made their way to Jerusalem. She concludes that they would not have abandoned the rituals of maintaining purity. Jesus would have participated in the rite of purification, including ritual immersion and sprinkling with the waters of purification. Wayne O. McCready approaches the topic of pilgrimage to Jerusalem and to Elephantine in Egypt from the theoretical perspective of place—place is not simply physical location but represents a way of seeing, knowing, and understanding the world...

Georges Bernanos and Francis Poulenc: Catholic Convergences in Dialogues of the Carmelites

FRANCIS POULENC'S DIALOGUES OF THE CARMELITES RANKS as one of the most Catholic operas of the twentieth century, as theologically insightful as it is lyrically beautiful. Except perhaps for Olivier Messiaen's modernist masterpiece Saint Francois d'Assise (which has sadly had only one U.S. production to date, San Francisco Opera, 2000), no other opera in the canon combines twentieth-century musical sensibilities with such profound theological themes on Catholic mysticism, martyrdom, and redemption. In this regard Dialogues has no peer in stature, recognition, and performance. Part of the opera's beauty is due to Poulenc's own musical genius; part is due to Georges Bernanos's text that Poulenc was inspired to use as his libretto; and part is due to the deep understanding of Catholic faith that both Poulenc and Bernanos shared. Composed in 1956, the opera is based on the true story of sixteen Carmelite nuns of Compienge, guillotined during the final throes of the French Revolution's Reign of Terror. Their story of martyrdom is a remarkable episode in the history of the Catholic faith in revolutionary France. As early as September 1792, the Carmelites of Compienge, like all other monastic religious institutions in France, were forced to leave their cloister and disband. Forbidden by law to meet or hold religious services, they decided secretly to make a corporate act of consecration whereby they would offer themselves as a sacrifice that the ills afflicting the Church and our unhappy kingdom might cease. (1) The disbanded nuns were thus arrested on June 21, 1794, for the crime of assembling illegally. They were placed in a prison at Compiegne with another order of religious women, the English Benedictines of Cambrai, who were awaiting their deportation back to England. During the three weeks they shared in prison, the two communities of nuns clandestinely prayed and offered comfort to one another. The Carmelites were then transferred to the Conciergerie in Paris on July 12 to await their trial and execution. For four days they remained there, comforting prisoners and secretly celebrating the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel on July 16. As the documented records of the Revolutionary Tribunal attest, they were judged guilty of being counterrevolutionaries and were executed on July 17, 1794. (2) There were numerous eyewitness reports that the Carmelites sang together the Miserere, the Salve Regina, and the Te Deum as they were led to the scaffold. They intoned the Veni Creator at the foot of the scaffold, and sang the Laudate Dominum omnes gentes as each nun climbed to her death. As they were guillotined, their voices diminished until only the Prioress was left singing, the last to die. Ten days after their execution, the Reign of Terror ended, and French Catholics immediately interpreted the martyrdom of the Carmelites as a mystical expiation for the sins of France. The cult surrounding these nuns was kept alive not only by the French faithful, but by the Benedictine nuns of Cambrai, now returned to Stanbrook Abbey, England. The sixteen Carmelites were beatified by the Church in 1906 and, as their cult spread, their story became the inspiration for a bestselling novel, two dramas, a film, and Poulenc's opera. (3) Given the often cliched notion that the twentieth century was the most secular of times, it is surprising that Poulenc's Dialogues has been such a success, both in his own life and in the contemporary canon of musical opera today. It is with regard to this point that I would like to consider the historical circumstances and spiritual conjunctions from which this opera was produced. I will frame the thesis as two questions: First, how did traditional Catholicism become intellectually compatible with all that was modern and progressive in French culture in the early part of the twentieth century? The second question follows: How are Georges Bernanos and Francis Poulenc artistic players in this Catholic revival? …

A Santa dos pretos: apropriações do culto de Santa Efigênia no Brasil colonial

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Mother of the gods: from Cybele to the Virgin Mary

This important work by a major scholar of ancient religion traces the history of the Mother of the Gods, originally an Anatolian deity whose cult spread through the Hellenistic, Roman, and ultimately Christian worlds, through shifting cultural and historical contexts.

Tomb cult and the ‘Greek renaissance’: the past in the present in the 8th centuryBC

Greek society was changing rapidly in the 8th century BC. The archaeological record reveals population growth, increasing political complexity, artistic experiments and a strong interest in the past. Because these processes resemble those at work in early modern Italy, the period has often been referred to as the ‘Greek renaissance’ (e.g. Ure 1922; Hägg 1983a; cf. Burke 1986). This paper is about the glorification of the past in the 8th century, and its relationship to the rise of thepolis, the Greek city state. I concentrate on one particular phenomenon, the spread of cults at tombs dating to the Mycenaean period (c. 1600-1200 BC). I argue that the common renaissance analogy has limited value, and that the 8thcentury Greeks created a past narrowly focussed on the persons of powerful ancient beings, from whom they could draw authority in the social upheavals which came about as the loose, aristocratic societies of the ‘Dark Age’ (c. 1200-750 BC) were challenged. Tomb cults go back at least to 950 BC, but after 750 they were redefined and used as a source of power in new ways. I have adapted my subtitle from Maurice Bloch’s well-known paper ‘The past and the present in the present’ (1977), where he argues that rituals bring the past into the present to form a system of cognition mystifying nature and preserving the social order. The argument here is slightly different. I stress the variety of the cults and the range of meanings they must have had, making their recipients highly ambiguous figures. The same cults could simultaneously evoke the new, relatively egalitarian ideology of the polis and the older ideals of heroic aristocrats who protected the grateful and defenceless lower orders, while standing far above them. Bloch's paper borrowed Malinowski’s idea of culture as a ‘long conversation’; developing the analogy, I look at the multiple meanings which any statement in such a conversation may have for the different actors.

Research Items

NAGA CUSTOMS.;-Owing to head-hunting troubles in 1923 it became necessary for Mr. J. H. Hutton to make two tours to parts of the Naga Hills not hitherto visited by white men. One journey was made in April, the second in October. Mr. Hutton has published a diary of the two tours as No. 1, vol. 11, of the Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Many types of implements, utensils, and weapons entirely new to the author were recorded, also new data relating to the burial and head customs, forms of tatoo, etc., as well as much information supplementary to that noted by the authors of the various monographs on the Naga tribes published by the Assam Government. In connexion with the Yungya custom of disposing of the dead in trees, the head being afterwards removed, the sacred tree in question is the Ficus, for which some veneration is consistently shown among the Nagas. Among the Wa of Burma and the Dusun of Borneo it is the head tree. The Mafulu of New Guinea use it much as the Yungya, and the Papuan tribes reverenced it. Women in southern India who desire children pay reverence to it, and the Akikuyu of East Africa regard it as the abode of the souls of the dead. It is, therefore, suggested that the beliefs about, and veneration for, the fig tree may be a negroid cult spread all over the Indian Ocean which has grown up into Hinduism from below. Similarly, a negroid belief may survive in the custom of hanging the combs of bees and wasps in the entrance of houses, a custom witnessed everywhere on the first tour. A similar custom is recorded in the Andaman Islands and in the Malay Peninsula. Its occurrence in the Andaman Islands certainly suggests a negrito origin.