DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

24 DISPOSAL OF THE DEAD [2.2
With such fertility rites went orgiastic performances which now seem
gross (on rare occasions) sensuality, but which must have been quite
difficult in the days of a meagre diet and a bare, uncertain livelihood,
and which were meant to stimulate nature to reproduce in sympathy. It
seems ridiculous to us now to discover traces of fertility rites performed
by European stone-age people for the increase of flints. There arose a
mysterious dread of menstruation — the tabu upon a male touching,
even by accident, the person or unwashed clothes of a woman in her
courses still being universal in Indian villages — along with worship of
the Mother Goddess, and of the moon whose cycle corresponds to the
menstrual cycle of the human female. Sublimated into a mystical
discipline, but with the gross, obscene, even gruesome ritual details
written down as they were, the most primitive fertility rites reappear
as Tantric practices. A second, less important, group of rites is connected
with death, visualized as the long sleep, or as return to the womb of the
great mother, Earth; these concepts are reflected in burial customs.
The crouched burial is often ambiguous, for early man slept in a crouch
for warmth — as his poorer descendants continued to do for a long time
— while burial in a pot of some sort is unmistakably return to the womb.
With the discovery of ore-refining, cremation by the sacred fire was
used to purify the unclean, fleshly portions of man, subject to decay ; the
residue was given urn-burial, or dropped into a sacred river as it is today.
These are important for our purpose only when archaeology combines
with ethnography to yield information about productive means and
relations in some ancient culture. In later class society, these rituals often
subsist in form, though the CONTENT is totally different. Generally, the
immediate purpose in settled producing society is profit for the priest
class, which insists that certain observances are necessary ; at a deeper
level, the unwieldy mass of ritual serves to petrify the later society, to
discourage innovation, to help preserve the class structure and the status
quo. This is also the reason why some communities still remain atrophied
as food-gatherers. In the earlier stage, the priest was either the tribal
chief, head of a clan, or a specially dedicated medicine man, for patriarchal
groups ; a goddess-chief-priestess or member of a sisterhood, with
matriarchy.