Elements of Hindu Iconography v2.c16.20

v2.c16.20

At the time of the *Mahābhārata*, animals seem to have been offered systematically as sacrifices in the temple of Śiva, for, we hear Kṛiṣhṇa admonishing Jarāsandha for his cruelty to other kings: says he, “what pleasure can those princes have in existence, when they have been consecrated for slaughter and kept as victims in the temple of Paśupati....Thou king, hast set apart for sacrifice to Mahādēva Kshatriya princes........In so far as you have resolved to offer these kings to Rudra, the guilt committed by you by slaughtering them will also attach to us........and we have never seen such a thing as offering human beings in sacrifice and thou seekest to sacrifice to Śaṅkara human victims.” Daksha in his rage, denounces Śiva as the “Proud abolisher of rites and demolisher of barriers, such as by teaching the word of the Vēda to the Śūdras....,” as “roaming about in cemeteries attended by the host of *bhūtas* (goblins), like a mad man, naked and with dishevelled hair. He is seen laughing, weeping, covered with ashes gathered from the funeral pyres and wearing a garland of human skulls and ornaments of human bones: he pretends to be the auspicious (*Śiva*) while in reality he is *aśiva*; he is insane and is liked by the insane; and he is the lord of the Pramathagaṇas, beings whose nature is essentially darkness...........Let this Bhava, the lowest of the gods, never receive at the worship of the gods like Indra, Upēndra and others, any portion of the oblations with them.” It might be noted here that the conscious neglect of Daksha to offer a portion of the sacrifice to Śiva in his great *yajña* was certainly due to his hatred for Śiva and his cult. Mahādēva himself admits that from the beginning he was not given any oblations in sacrifices : addressing Umā, he says “the old practice of the gods has all along been that no portion should be offered to me in any sacrifice. By this custom, which is established by the earliest arrangement, the gods legitimately (*dharmatah*) decline to give me a share in the sacrifices.” From these statements we are led to infer that the Vēdic Indian looked upon Śiva as a low class deity and was not offering him any oblations along with Indra and other gods. By the entreaties of his wife Pārvatī, Śiva establishes for the first time in the *yāga* of Daksha, his right to receive oblations; this “lowest of the gods” gets up to the level of the Vēdic gods at a later period and is reconciled with the Vēdic Hindu. That the ways of the adorers of Śiva were indeed revolting is seen in the imprecation of Bhr̥igu found in the Śrī Bhāgavata. He says “ Let those performers of the rites of the Śaiva cult be heretics and opponents of the true Vēdas. Having lost their purity and misled in their understanding, wearing matted hair, ashes and bones, let them undergo the Śaiva initiation, in which liquor is the deity. Since you, the followers of the Śiva cult, revile the Vēda and the Brāhmaṇas, who are the only safeguards keeping intact the straying humanity, you have become heretics. For, the Vēda is the auspicious (Śiva) and the eternal path of the people, which has been followed by the ancients and of which Janārdana is the authority.” We obtain a glimpse of the real state of affairs at that time from the quotation from the Śrī Bhāgavata given above. People, including some Brāhmaṇas, left the fold of the Vēdic religion and joined the cult of Śiva, reviled the Vēdic religion, took to spirituous liquors and became celibate mendicants, daubing their bodies with the ashes of the cemeteries and adorning themselves with bones. They threw off the study of the Vēdas and violated their sanctity by teaching them to Śūdras and others. The conditions of the Vēdic Brāhmaṇas of that period is mirrored in the counter