Caste in India: The Facts and the System c8.s5.20

c8.s5.20

Impurity is contagious, and therefore excludes its victim from the religious function of the repast, and for this reason it is that by sitting down to a common banquet with his caste-companions an offender who has been temporarily excluded consecrates his rehabilitation. In virtue of the same principle, the spouses in the solemn marriage of the Romans shared a cake before the sacred fire, which was an essential ceremony marking the adoption of the wife into the family-religion of her husband. This should not be regarded as a singular or unrelated fact; it has actually been said that in the worship which united the curia or the phratry the most significant religious act was the taking of the meal.¹ The Roman feasts of the Charistia, which gathered kinsmen together, excluded not merely all strangers but any relation whose conduct appeared to render him unworthy.² The Persians had retained similar usages.³ The daily repasts of the prytanes had remained among the Greeks one of the official rites of the city religion, where, moreover, the composition of the meal was not a matter of indifference, the nature of the dishes and the kind of wine to be served being defined by rules which varied with the locality. In excluding various foods, India may have generalized the application of the principle, but she did not invent it, for this too has in the common past its analogies and its germ.