The Bullroarer Atlas

SERVIER1970-004 - secondary catalog

Ceylon / Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka - Ceylon - South Asia

Sacred / spirit

A slender, sharply pointed blade painted down its length with a row of linked triangle outlines, cord wound around its tapered tip,...
Representative image. A slender, sharply pointed blade painted down its length with a row of linked triangle outlines, cord wound around its tapered tip, photographed with a Pitt Rivers scale card above the number 1923.84.958: shown for the general South Asian type, not the Ceylon rhombe documented here. © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (acc. 1923.84.958) Image source

Source term: rombo

runa — the Sinhalese children's name Seligmann recorded for the whirled wooden slat at Colombo. The companion cattle-scarer is the kotipetta (koti, cheetah; petta, a thin slip of wood) or helibambara of Perera's note.

The "sacred instrument at Buddhist festivals" of the encyclopaedias turns out, in the one dedicated study, to be a child's plaything. C. G. Seligmann, who learned of it from the director of the Colombo Museum and then watched the children at it himself, found that on Ceylon the whirled slat was a toy the Sinhalese called runa: a troop of boys whirling them followed the Perahera, the procession of the great Buddhist festival held each year about the end of May, while at Kandy the boys cracked whips instead. A second island use is plainly utilitarian rather than sacred: A. A. Perera's note in Spolia Zeylanica records the bamboo blade (kotipetta, "cheetah-wood") swung by boys to keep cattle off the paddy, its drone likened to a cheetah's growl. Servier's rhombe tied to "certain Buddhist ceremonies" compresses the first of these into something more solemn than the primary will bear.

I was informed that at Colombo a troop of boys whirling these toys, called runa, followed the Perahera procession (a ceremony in the great Buddhist festival held annually about the end of May). This is not done at Kandy, their place being taken by boys' cracking whips.

C. G. Seligmann, "The Bull-Roarer in Ceylon," Folklore 11 (1900)
Object
Servier says the rhombe is associated on Ceylon with certain Buddhist ceremonies; EB1911 independently says Ceylon bullroarers were toys and sacred instruments at Buddhist festivals.
Function
Broad Ceylon/Sri Lanka claim for bullroarer use as both toy and sacred Buddhist-festival instrument; no ceremony name is supplied.
Map confidence
low_medium - country/island centroid; Servier and EB1911 give no locality or Buddhist ceremony name
Source location
Seligmann 1900, "The Bull-Roarer in Ceylon," Folklore 11 (runa / Perahera passage); Perera, Spolia Zeylanica 8 (1912), p. 147 note 22.

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