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RELIGIOUS FESTIVALS
Christmas eve, sweetmeats to the Fathers, "In Vaticano dulcia patribus exhibentur." Of course the Fathers of the Christian church are intended; but it is scarcely possible to avoid a suspicion that something was originally meant, that the practice was, in fact, a relique of heathenism, and that the "Fathers" were in their primitive character, the Dii Manes of the Romans, the Pitris of the Hindus.
Whatever may be thought of this coincidence, there can scarcely be a doubt that we have some community of origin between the Pongal and the blessing of the cattle at Rome, on the day dedicated to St. Anthony. According to the legend*, the Saint once tended a herd of swine, and hence possibly his connexion with other animals. A much more intelligible relation subsists between them and the Hindu Indra, or Jupiter pluvius, as provender is plentiful and nutritive in proportion as rain is abundant. The following account of this ceremony is taken from "Rome in the Nineteenth Century", and it will be observed that the time of the year, the decorating of the cattle, the bringing them to a public place, the sprinkling of them with holy water, and the very purport of the blessing, that they may be exempt from evils, are so decidedly Indian, that could a Drávira Brahman be set down of a sudden in the Piazza, before St. Mary's church at Rome, and were he asked what ceremony he
*
[See J. F. Wolf, "Beiträge zur deutschen Mythologie", 1857, II, 86.]
