Devi signifies '_the_ goddess' _par excellence_. She is often the
tutelary goddess of the village and of the family, and is held to have
been originally Mother Earth, which may be supposed to be correct. In
tracts where the people of northern and southern India meet she is
identified with Anna Purna, the corn-goddess of the Telugu country;
and in her form of Gauri or 'the Yellow One' she is perhaps herself
the yellow corn. As Gauri she is worshipped at weddings in conjunction
with Ganesh or Ganpati, the god of Good Fortune; and it is probably
in honour of the harvest colour that Hindus of the upper castes
wear yellow at their weddings and consider it lucky. A Brahman also
prefers to wear yellow when eating his food. It has been seen [12]
that red is the lucky colour of the lower castes of Hindus, and the
reason probably is that the shrines of their gods are stained red with
the blood of the animals sacrificed. High-caste Hindus no longer make
animal sacrifices, and their offerings to Siva, Vishnu and Devi consist
of food, flowers and blades of corn. Thus yellow would be similarly
associated with the shrines of the gods. All Hindu brides have their
bodies rubbed with yellow turmeric, and the principal religious flower,
the marigold, is orange-yellow. Yellow is, however, also lucky as being
the colour of Vishnu or the Sun, and a yellow flag is waved above
his great temple at Ramtek on the occasion of the fair. Thus Devi
as the corn-goddess perhaps corresponds to Demeter, but she is not
in this form an animal goddess. The Hindus worshipping Mother Earth,
as all races do in the early stage of religion, may by a natural and
proper analogy have ascribed the gift of the corn to her from whom
it really comes, and have identified her with the corn-goddess. This
is by no means a full explanation of the goddess Devi, who has many
forms. As Parvati, the hill-maiden, and Durga, the inaccessible one,
she is the consort of Siva in his character of the mountain-god of
the Himalayas; as Kali, the devourer of human flesh, she is perhaps
the deified tiger; and she may have assimilated yet more objects of
worship into her wide divinity. But there seems no special reason
to hold that she is anywhere believed to be the deified buffalo; and
the probable explanation of the Dasahra rite would therefore seem to
be that the buffalo was at first venerated as the corn-god because,
like the pig in Greece, he was most destructive to the crops, and
a buffalo was originally slaughtered and eaten sacramentally as an
act of worship. At a later period the divinity attaching to the corn
was transferred to Devi, an anthropomorphic deity of a higher class,
and in order to explain the customary slaughter of the buffalo, which
had to be retained, the story became current that the beneficent
goddess fought and slew the buffalo-demon which injured the crops,
for the benefit of her worshippers, and the fast was observed and
the buffalo sacrificed in commemoration of this event. It is possible
that the sacrifice of the buffalo may have been a non-Aryan rite, as
the Mundas still offer a buffalo to Deswali, their forest god, in the
sacred grove; and the Korwas of Sarguja nave periodical sacrifices to
Kali in which many buffaloes are slaughtered. In the pictures of her
fight with Bhainsasur, Devi is shown as riding on a tiger, and the
uneducated might imagine the struggle to have resembled that between
a tiger and a buffalo. As the destroyer of buffaloes and deer which
graze on the crops the tiger may even be considered the cultivator's
friend. But in the rural tracts Bhainsasur himself is still venerated
in the guise of a corn-deity, and pig are perhaps offered to him as
the animals which nowadays do most harm to the crops.