The Todas, so well described by Dr. Rivers, are a small community, less than a thousand all told, who have retired out of the stress of the world into the fastnesses of the Nilgiri Hills, in southern India, where they spend a safe but decidedly listless life.  They are in a backwater, and are likely to remain there.  At any rate, their religion is not such as to make them more enterprising.  Gods they may be said to have none.  The bare names of certain deities of the hill-tops are retained, but whether these were once the honoured gods of the Todas or, as some think, those of a former race, certain it is that there is more shadow than substance about them now.  The real religion of the people centres round a dairy-ritual.  From a practical and economic point of view, the work of the dairy consists in converting the milk of their buffaloes into the butter and buttermilk which constitute their staple diet.  From a religious point of view, it consists in converting something they dare not eat into something they can eat.

Many, though not all, of their buffaloes are sacred, and their milk may not be drunk.  The reason why it may not be drunk anthropologists may cast about to discover, but the Todas themselves do not know.  All that they know, and are concerned to know, is that things would somehow all go wrong, if any one were foolish enough to commit such a sin.  So in the Toda temple, which is a dairy, the Toda priest, who is the dairyman, sets about rendering the sacred products harmless.  The dairy has two compartments—­one sacred, the other profane.  In the first are stored the sacred vessels, into which the milk is placed when it comes from the buffaloes, and in which it is turned into butter and buttermilk with the help of some of the previous brew, this having meanwhile been put by in an especially sacred vessel.  In the second compartment are profane vessels, destined to receive the butter and buttermilk, after they have been carefully transferred from the sacred vessels with the help of an intermediary vessel, which stands exactly on the line between the two compartments.  This transference, being carried out to the accompaniment of all sorts of reverential gestures and utterances, secures such a profanation of the sacred substance as is without the evil consequences that would otherwise be entailed.  Thus the ritual is essentially precautionary.  A taboo is the hinge of the whole affair.

And the tendency of such a negative type of religion is to pile precautions on precautions.  Thus the dairyman, in order to be equal to his sacred office, must observe taboos without end.  He must be celibate.  He must avoid all contact with the dead.  He is limited to certain kinds of food; which, moreover, must be prepared in a certain way, and consumed in a certain place.  His drink, again, is a special milk, which must be poured out with prescribed formulas.  He is inaccessible to ordinary folk save on certain days and in certain ways, their mode of approach,