The Antiquities of Orissa v2.c17.s1.117

v2.c17.s1.117

[ 99 ] No Indian divinity has a more unenviable notoriety in English literature than Jagannātha. Alike in poetry and in prose, in works of imagination as in sober history, he forms a never-dying illustration of all that is cruel, all that is horrible, all that is most revolting to every sense of humanity. The Cretan Dionysiacs at which little children were immolated in honor of Dionysius, the Druidical wicker cage with its writhing mass of human victims destined to be burnt alive, the Mexican Tezcatlepoca with his annual pile of a hundred thousand captive heads, the Peruvian Pruloucon with its mounds of human flesh every year offered to pacify the wrath of an irate divinity, pale before this hideous Moloch whose terrible car 'through blood and bones ploughs its dreadful path'. Has the orator to excite in his audience a feeling of revolting abhorrence against any hated object?—he cannot do it better than by denouncing it as a car of Jagannātha; the preacher subserves the cause of religion by indulging in the same metaphor; and the statesman holds it as one of his most potent invectives, fit to be hurled at everything that he thinks the most detestable. It is certain, nevertheless, that human conception has never realized a more innocent and gentle divinity than Jagannātha; and the tenets of his votaries are the very reverse of sanguinary or revolting. In fact, never was opprobrium more unjustly cast on an inoffensive object than in this instance, and none merited it less. How the mistake has arisen, is an enquiry which does not fall within the scope of this essay, but many circumstances will be adverted to lower down, which will, it is believed, be of use in repudiating the foul charge.