Juggernaut
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Juggernaut. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
jug'ger-nawt, a famous Hindu idol. The temple of Juggernaut is situated in a sacred town of that name some 300 miles along the coast southeast from Calcutta. The grounds are of large extent, inclosing 120 temples. Twenty-four festivals a year draw thousands of pilgrims whose gifts amount to incredible sums. Once a year Juggernaut, on a car forty-five feet high and thirty-five feet square, mounted on sixteen wheels, seven feet in diameter, is dragged to his summer house a mile distant. The sand is so deep and the devotees so poorly organized that the ceremony occupies several days. Englishmen formerly supposed that the worship of Juggernaut required that a score or two of devotees cast themselves under the ponderous wheels of the car to propitiate the god's wrath, but this is probably an error. It may be seen readily that, with a frantic, howling mob pushing and dragging the equivalent of a three-story house through deep sand, enough poor wretches would accidentally get under the wheels or be trampled to death to secure the favor of any ordinary idol. The idea of a Juggernaut rolling on mercilessly over the bodies of its self-devoted victims has become fixed in our language, however, and is applied to any burdensome custom or institution requiring sacrifice. See India
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
in Hindu mythology, ing back with it to the fort at Bethulia. one of the 1,000 names of Vishnu, the On the loss of their leader the Assyrians fled, the Israelites pursuing and inflicting second god of the Hindu triad. Juggernaut is Vishnu, especially in his 8th inon them great slaughter. The book apcarnation, Krishna. The great seat of parently professes to have been penned The his worship is at Pûrî, in Orissa, where 0): ); just after the events recorded (xiv: 10 but the earliest known historic testimony he is associated with his her to its existence is by Clement of Rome bhadra, Baldeo, or Balaram, and their sister Sabhadra. The idols have no legs, (Ep. i: 55), though it probably existed America and only stumps of arms; the heads and as early as 175 to 100 B. C. The ablest Mass., Aus critics consider it a fiction rather than a eyes are very large. The two brothers Brown Un have arms projecting horizontally from genuine history. theology the ears. They are wooden busts of eminary.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The Rath Yatra that Aiton's described in 1910 still happens every summer at Puri, with three towering chariots rebuilt from fresh timber each year and hauled by thousands of pilgrims — Jagannath's car remains the largest, and deaths still occur, but from crowd crushes rather than devotion. Aiton's cautious note that the tales of worshippers throwing themselves under the wheels were "probably an error" is now the settled scholarly view: the image was largely built up by British missionary and travel writing of the early nineteenth century. The place names have moved on more than the festival: Collier's "Pûrî, in Orissa" is now Puri in Odisha, the state renamed in 2011, and the temple still admits only Hindus. In English the word itself has drifted from Aiton's "burdensome custom or institution" to mean any unstoppable force, and in Britain, colloquially, a very large lorry.
Written for this edition, 2026.