Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies - DUBOIS, Abbé Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, Dubois | Page 636

50G
LIBERTINAOE IN TEMPLES
goddess for having deigned to overwhelm them with insults.
Even high-caste Hindus are to be seen at this festival set-k-
ing to obtain the coveted honour.
The goddess Tipamma of Mogur is not the only member
She has six sisters, who are not in any way
of her family.
inferior to her in point of decency and politeness.
Each
one of them has her own temple, in which like ceremonies
In the whole of Southern Mysore, from
are performed.
Alambadi as far as Wynaad, for a distance of more than
thirty leagues, these abominable revels are held in the
highest esteem.
There are temples in certain isolated places, too, where
the most disgusting debauchery is the only service agree-
There children are promised
able to the presiding deity.
to women who, laying aside all shame, grant their favours
At such places a feast is
to all persons indiscriminately.
celebrated every year in the month of January, at which
both sexes, the scum of the country-side, meet. Barren
women, in the hope that they will cease to be so, visit them
after binding themselves by a vow to grant their favours
to a fixed number of libertines.
Others, who have entirely
lost all sense of decency, go there in order to testify their
reverence for the deity of the place by prostituting them-
selves, openly and without shame, even at the very gates
of the temple.
There is one of these sinks of iniquity five or six leagues
from the village where I am writing these pages, on the
banks of the Cauvery, in a lonely place called Junginagatta.
The temple is not striking to look at but the January
feast is celebrated there with the utmost refinements of
;
vice.
People have also pointed out to me a temple of the same
description near Kara-madai, in the district of Coimbatore,
and another not far from Mudu-dorai, in Eastern Mysore.
I have before remarked that these dens of debauchery
are always situated in places far removed from all habita-
tions.
According to Herodotus and Strabo, every woman among
the Assyrians and Babylonians was obliged to prostitute
herself once in her life in the temple of the goddess Mylitta,
the Aphrodite of the Greeks. This tradition so flagrantly