The Woman Follows With Her Friends, In
Covered Coaches.
And having thus paraded through the principal places of
the city or town, they return home and partake of a banquet, the men and
women being in separate apartments.
They are mostly married at the age
of twelve or thirteen, the matches being made by their mothers.
Sec.4. Of the Sects, Opinions, Rites, Priests, and other Circumstances of
the Hindoo Religion; with other Observations.
The Hindoos[239] are distributed into eighty and four several sects, all
of which differ materially in opinions. This has often filled me with
wonder; but I know that they are all deluded by Satan, who is the father
of division. Their illiterate priests are called Bramins, being the
same with the Brachmanni of the ancients; and, for aught I could
learn, are so sottishly ignorant and unsteady, that they know not what
they believe. They have little round-built temples, which they call
pagodas, in which are images in most monstrous shapes, which they
worship. Some of them dream, of Elysian fields, to which their souls
pass over a Styx or Acheron, and there assume new bodies. Others hold
that ere long, this world shall have an end, after which they shall live
here again, upon a new earth. They talk of four books which were sent
them about 6000 years ago by their prophet Ram, two of which were
sealed up and might not be opened, the other two being read by the
Bramins only.
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