Rattud (the Ra'tud-Sonum)

In Piers Vitebsky's analysis of Sora religion, the dead are assimilated into collective sonum categories, and Ra'tud (also spelled Rattud) is one of the principal such categories, named alongside the Sun and Leopard groups; in shamanic dialogue these collective categories 'unravel' into lists of named ancestors, and at funeral dialogues the deceased is cross-examined to establish which such group has taken him. The Ra'tud-Sonum thus stands beside the Sun-Sonum (Uyungsum) and Earth-Sonum (Labosum) as one of the great powers through which the Sora reason about illness and mortality, although unlike those two its name has no everyday translation in the ethnographic literature. The same power appears to have been recorded a century before Vitebsky's fieldwork by F. Fawcett, whose account, reproduced by Edward Thurston, describes a sacrifice offered to Rathu after that being had given fever to the sister of the officiating celebrant.

Domains

• death
• disease

Powers

• to give fever to the living until propitiated with sacrifice
• to gather the dead of its class into a collective group of named ancestors

Sources

• Piers Vitebsky, Dialogues with the Dead: The Discussion of Mortality among the Sora of Eastern India, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993.
• Edward Thurston (with K. Rangachari), Castes and Tribes of Southern India, vol. VI, s.v. 'Savara', Government Press, Madras, 1909.
• Piers Vitebsky, Living without the Dead: Loss and Redemption in a Jungle Cosmos, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2017.