Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v2.c19.69

v2.c19.69

¹ All the law writings put this crime, as regards the atonement laid down for it, on the same level as Brahman-murder. So Baudh., ii, 1, 1.12 (= ii, 1.11; milder in i, 10, 19.5 = i, 10.27); Gautama, xxii, 12; Manu, xi, 88; Āpaśt., i, 9, 24.9 (in every case the ātreyī); Viṣṇu, xxxvi, 1; 1, 1–9 (here further the twelve years’ dreadful penance explicitly described; in both passages, however, atrigotrā instead of ātreyī through a false interpretation). In Vasiṣṭha, xx, 34 this direction is restricted to the Brāhmaṇī, and the commentators fill in this word in the other law books also. But probably this is wrong. Vasiṣṭha explains the ātreyī as a woman that has bathed after her courses, and therefore, when her husband lies with her, gets a child (35–36). Nilakaṇṭha explains (but wrongly) in the passage from the Mahābhārata the ātreyī as a woman with child. On the view which here lies as a foundation it would, indeed, come to the same thing. In the prescription quoted from Viṣṇu, it is also said of the woman who is just menstruating (rajasvalā), and her that is with child, that her murder is the same as Brahman-murder, and to be atoned for like it. Among the Old Germans also for a woman with child a higher wergild had to be paid (Rullkoetter, *The Legal Protection of Women among the*