The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c17.78

v1.c17.78

To the gods the Indian stood in an attitude of dependence, but of hope. The gods are willing to grant boons if they are worshipped; and the overwhelming mass of the evidence shows that the ordinary Vedic sacrifice was an offering made to win the divine favour, though thank-offerings may well have been known¹. Inextricably bound up with this conception of the divine relation is that other which regards the gods as subject to control by the worshipper if he but know the correct means, a motive clearly seen in the selection of the horse as a sacrifice whereby the swift steed, the sun, may regain strength and favour his worshippers. The higher and more mystic view of the sacrifice as a sacrament is not found except in the quite rudimentary form of the common meal of the priests on the sacrificial victim: there is no proof that in thus consuming the victim the priests deemed themselves to be consuming their god, though doubtless they regarded the meal as bringing them into special relation with the god who shared it with them and so in some measure acquired the same nature as themselves. But if the view of sacrifice was less mystic, in some aspects at least, than in the case of the Mediterranean peoples, Vedic civilisation at this stage was spared the horror of human sacrifice, which can be found in the Saṃhitā only by implausible conjecture².