This Season Is To Be Celebrated Once In
Every Twelve Years, But It Appears To Be A Field From Which Messieurs
Les Brahmans Gathered The Most Abundant Harvest.
At this epoch,
all the mothers have to seek audiences from the goddess Mata, the
great mother - of course through her rightful oracles the Brahmans.
Mata is the special patroness of all the four kinds of marriages
practised in India:
The marriages of adults, of children, of babies,
and of specimens of humanity that are as yet to be born.
The latter is the queerest of all, because the feelings it excites
are so very like gambling. In this case, the marriage ceremony
is celebrated between the mothers of the future children. Many a
curious incident is the result of these matrimonial parodies. But
a true Brahman will never allow the derision of fate to shake his
dignity, and the docile population never will doubt the infallibility
of these "elect of the gods." An open antagonism to the Brahmanical
institutions is more than rare; the feelings of reverence and
dread the masses show to the Brahmans are so blind and so sincere,
that an outsider cannot help smiling at them and respecting them
at the same time.
If both the mothers have children of the same sex, it will not
upset the Brahman in the least; he will say this was the will of
the goddess Mata, it shows that she desires the new-born babies to
be two loving brothers, or two loving sisters, as the case may be,
in future.
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