Vows

A vow ( Lat. ''votum'', vow, promise; see Vote ) is a transaction between a Person and his/her/its Deity whereby the former undertakes in the future to render some service or gift or devotes something valuable now and here to his use. The vow is a kind of Oath , with the Deity being both the Witness and recipient of the Promise . For an example see the Book Of Judges . Also, see the Bodhisattva vows.

The god is usually reckoned to be going to grant some special favor to his votary in return for the promise made or service declared.

A vow has to be distinguished, firstly, from other and lower ways of persuading or constraining supernatural powers to give what man desires and to help him in time of need; and secondly, from the ordered ritual and regularly recurring Ceremonies of Religion . These two distinctions must be examined a little more at length.

It would be an abuse of language to apply the term vow to the uses of
imitative Magic , e.g. to the action of a barren woman among the Batta s of Sumatra , who in order to become a mother makes a Wood en image of a Child and holds it in her lap. For in such rites no prominence is given to the idea -- even if it exists -- of a personal relation between the petitioner and the supernatural power. The latter is, so to
speak, mechanically constrained to act by the Spell or magical rite;
the forces liberated in fulfilment, not of a petition, but of a wish
are not those of a conscious will, and therefore no thanks are due
from the wisher in case he is successful. The deities, however, to
whom vows are made or discharged are already personal beings, capable
of entering into contracts or covenants with man, of understanding the
claims which his vow establishes on their benevolence, and of valuing
his gratitude; conversely, in the taking of a vow the petitioner's
piety and spiritual attitude have begun to outweigh those merely
ritual details of the ceremony which in magical rites are
all-important.

Sometimes the old magical usage survives side by side with the more
developed idea of a personal power to be approached in prayer. For
example, in the Maghreb (in North Africa ), in time of drought the
maidens of Ma.zouna carry every evening in procession through the
streets a doll called ghonja, really a dressed-up wooden spoon,
symbolizing a pre- Islam ic Rain - Spirit . Often one of the girls carries on her shoulders a sheep, and her companions sing the following words:

Rain, fall, and I will give you my kid.
He has a 'black head', he neither bleats
Nor complains; he says not, 'I am cold.'
Rain, who filiest the skins,
Wet our raiment.
Rain, who feedest the rivers,
Overturn the doors of our houses.

Here we have a sympathetic rain charm, combined with a prayer to the
rain viewed as a personal Goddess and with a promise or vow to
give her the animal. The point of the promise lies of course in the
fact that water is in that country stored and carried in
sheep-skins.¹

Secondly, the vow is quite apart from established Cult s, and is not provided for in the religious calendar. The Roman vow (votum), as W. W. Fowler observes in his work ''The Roman Festivals'' (London, 1899), p. 346, "was the exception, not the rule; it was a promise made by an individual at some critical moment, not the ordered and recurring ritual of the family or the State.' The vow, however, contained so large an element of ordinary prayer that in the Greek Language one and the same word (''ebxi''~) expressed both. The characteristic mark of the vow, as Suidas in his lexicon and the Greek Church fathers remark, was that it was a promise either of things to be offered to God in the future and at once consecrated to Him in view of their being so offered, or of austerities to be undergone. For offering and austerity, sacrifice and suffering, are equally calculated to appease an offended deity's wrath or win his goodwill.

The Bible affords many examples of vows. Thus in Judges
11. Jephthah 'vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, If thou wilt indeed
deliver the children of Ammon into my hand, then it shall be that
whosoever cometh forth out of the doors of my house' to meet me, when
I return in peace from the children. of Ammon, it shall be the Lord's,
and I will offer it up for a burnt-offering.' In the sequel it is his
own daughter who so meets him, and he sacrifices her after a respite
of two months granted her in order to 'bewail her virginity upon the
mountains.' A thing or person thus vowed to the deity became holy and sanctified to God. (It must be noted that Jephthah could not have actually burned his daughter in sacrifice as it would constitute human sacrifice - something that God explicitly forbade. It is likely that his daughter would remain unmarried and devoted to serve the Lord in the temple.) It belonged to once to the sanctuary or to the priests
who represented the god. In the Jewish Religion , the latter, under
certain conditions, defined in Leviticus 27, could permit it to be
redeemed. But to substitute an unclean for a clean beast which had
been vowed, or an imperfect victim for a flawless one, was to court
with certainty the divine displeasure.

It is often difficult to distinguish a vow from an , as Tacitus relates ('' Germania '', 31), young men allowed their hair and beards to grow, and vowed to court danger in that guise."

''The first version of this article was copied from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica .''

REFERENCE

Professor A. Eel in paper ''Quelques rites pour obtenir la pluie'', in xiv Congrès des Orientalistes (Alger, 1905).

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Vows