Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v2.c14.4.6

v2.c14.4.6

Sacer means “holy” and “cursed”—he that has been raised above sin and earthly mankind through blissful death in battle, and the shameful outcast from the caste appear side by side in the laws we have quoted! Cp. with this subject of death by violence, for instance, *Zschr. d. Ver. f. Volksk.*, Bd. 14, p. 31 ff.; 322 f. (and the references there); Caland, *Totenverehrung*, 74; *Zschr. f. Ethnol.*, v, 187; Crooke, *Anthropos*, Bd. 4, p. 68 (Nāga); ibid., 464 (Dravidian peoples); Hosten, ibid., p. 682 (Pahariya, India); *Anthropos*, Bd. vii, p. 649 (Khond); Hartland, i, 182 (Pahariya). And the very animal one kills can become a destroying being. So the Hindu, when a snake has been killed, carries out the same death rites as he does in honour of a kinsman (Rāmakrishna, *Life in an Indian Village*, 1891, p. 135, from south India; Thurston, *Omens and Superstitions*, etc., 1912, p. 123); and these often discussed ideas are very well expressed in the 46th rune of the Kalevala, where the bear, the strong king of the Finnish forests, is appeased with the most reverential ceremonies and the most honeyed words, and he is told that it is not men who have taken his life, but that he fell himself out of the fir-tree to his death. Cp. Crooke, *Pop. Rel.*, ii, 212.