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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c13.s2: § 2. Fetishism

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c13.s2

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§ 2. Fetishism

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The worship of natural objects, whether celestial, ethereal or terrestrial, is sharply to be distinguished from the reverence paid to earthly objects or animals, not as in themselves normally or continually divine, but because for a certain purpose and in certain conditions they are deemed to be filled with the divine spirit.¹ It is clear, however obvious the distinction is as a matter of theory, that in many cases it must be extremely difficult to distinguish the two phenomena. A simple example of the difficulty is afforded by the contrast which seems to exist between the reverence paid by the priest to his offering implements, such as the pressing stones and the offering post, and that paid by the warrior to his weapons. In both cases the reverence is that paid to the work of human hands, but it can hardly be held in the case of the warrior that his weapons are conceived as being filled by any external spirit for the time being: rather they have, though made by human hands, when made, a life and reality of their own, which renders it right on special occasions that they should receive due honour and veneration. For the whole time of their existence as such, before they are destroyed by the event of war or abandoned as outworn, they retain this character of their own. On the other hand, the reverence paid to the pressing stones and other implements of the sacrifice seems far more naturally to be attributed to the holy character of the sacrificial ground and of the surroundings through the presence of the god. The sacred strew on which the god is invited to take his seat and all the implements must surely be filled with the divine afflatus for the period of the offering. The offering post in the animal sacrifice is solemnly anointed, and surrounded with a girdle which acts in some measure as clothing. It has been suggested that in this action we are to see the bodily presence of the god, as in the case of the Semitic Ašera on one interpretation, and in the alternative Oldenberg¹ suggests that the treatment of the post is a relic of tree worship. Neither explanation is absolutely necessary; we need not suppose that the post was originally placed there for any other than its clear purpose to hold the sacrificial victim fast for sacrifice, but once there it was impossible that it should not be in some degree filled with the divine spirit, apart from its divine connexion with the tree spirit.

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¹ This is perhaps the most useful sense of the term fetishism, which sometimes is applied to what is here called animatism. See C. de Brosses, *Du culte des dieux fétiches* (Paris, 1760); Bastian, *Über Fetischismus* (1894); de Visser, *Die nichtmenschengestaltigen Götter der Griechen* (1903); Haddon, *Magic and Fetishism* (1906); R. M. Meyer, *Archiv für Rel.*, xi. 320 ff.; Hopkins, *Hist. of Rel.*, pp. 35 f.

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¹ *Rel. des Veda*², pp. 87, 88. For fetishes in Greece and Babylon see Farnell, *Greece and Babylon*, pp. 225 ff. For religious vessels as fetishes in Rome in the worship of the Dea Dia, see Warde Fowler, *Religious Experience of the Roman People*, pp. 436, 489, 490. Helm (*Altgerm. Rel.* i. 20 ff.) insists on magic potencies as essential elements of fetishism.

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In other cases the purely temporary nature of the divine character of the fetish is quite obvious. Thus in the household ritual, during the nights after marriage in which the newly wedded pair are bidden to observe chastity, there is placed between them a staff clad in a garment and made fragrant, which is traditionally asserted to be the Gandharva Viçvāvasu, and the tradition is confirmed by the fact that the ritual prescribes for the taking away of the staff a formula addressed to that spirit.² Another fetish is the wheel which represents the sun:³ in the Vājapeya sacrifice a wheel-shaped cake of grain is placed on the top of the post, to which the animal victim is tied: a ladder is brought: the sacrificer mounts upon it saying to his wife: ‘Come, let us two mount to the sun.’ He then mounts and seizes the wheel, saying, ‘We have attained the sun, O gods.’⁴ At the Mahāvrata festival of the winter solstice an Aryan and a Çūdra strove over a white round skin, which is stated to be a symbol of the sun: the Aryan conquers and strikes down the Çūdra with the skin.⁵ There can be no doubt of the solar nature of the wheel, and the existence of this sun symbol among the Celts and the Germans suggests that possibly the symbolism may be Indo-European. A torch can also serve to represent the sun; if the offerer has forgotten to perform a libation before sunset, he can perform it to the light of a torch which brings back the light, or he can use gold in place of the sun.⁶ This motive is of constant occurrence: in the piling of the fire altar a gold plate is set down to be an image of the sun.⁷ Agni, as fire, is closely connected with gold: it is forbidden to study the Veda in a place where there is neither fire nor gold: gold is the seed of Agni, and in the piling of the fire altar⁸ there is placed in the erection the gold figure of a man, who seems to be intended to represent Agni: while butter is poured over the figure, prayers are offered to Agni, and that fire is latent in the figure is shown by the warning to the priests not to pass before it, lest it consume them with fire. A similar rule forbids the priest to carry the Soma before the altars allotted to each priest, as they are the symbols of the guardians of the Soma, and would therefore be inclined to take the Soma away from the priests that were bearing it.¹ In the case of the Pravargya ceremony, milk is made hot for the Açvins in a great jar, the Mahāvīra, ‘great hero’, pot: according to one authority the pot was given some semblance of a human face, and it is difficult to doubt that this pot was intended as a symbol of the sun.² Equally symbolic would be its use if we were to accept a suggestion made with all circumspection by Oldenberg³ that we may have here a trace of the myth of the cutting off of the head of Makha, who is a demon of quite unknown nature, by Indra, and the drinking of milk from this ghastly relic, just as it seems from the body of Namuci, a demon with which Makha may have had associations, sweetness is said to have come.

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² Winternitz, *Altind. Hochzeitsrituell*, p. 88.

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³ For Germany see Helm, *op. cit.* i. 173 ff.; for the Celts, Gaidoz, *Études sur la mythologie gauloise* (1886).

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⁴ Weber, *Ueber den Vājapeya*, pp. 20, 34.

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⁵ Keith, *Çāṅkhāyana Āraṇyaka*, pp. 80 ff.; von Schroeder, *Arische Religion*, ii. 17, 38, 66 f.

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⁶ ÇB. xii. 4. 4. 6.

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⁷ ÇB. vii. 4. 1. 10.

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⁸ Weber, *Ind. Stud.* xiii. 228 ff.

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¹ Hillebrandt, *Ved. Myth.* i. 443 ff.

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² Eggeling, *SBE.* xliv. pp. xlvi ff.; Hillebrandt, *Ved. Myth.*, p. 11, n. 2.

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³ *Rel. des Veda*¹, p. 89.

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Other examples of this fetishism can easily be cited, but in comparison with them a passage in the Rigveda⁴ stands in a certain isolation of character. It is there said by a poet: ‘Who will buy this my Indra for ten cows? When he hath conquered his foe, let him return it to me!’ This passage can have but one sense: some fetish of Indra must be meant, whether a rough anthropomorphic picture or merely something much ruder we cannot say: the latter view has, however, the greater probability, in that statues of deities are otherwise not hinted at until the end of the Vedic period,⁵ when they may have been introduced under Western influences. It is characteristic that the god who is the hero of this episode is the warrior god, Indra: no other deity of first-rate importance in the Rigveda is treated habitually with such lightness of spirit⁶ as he is, and the fact that he is dealt with in this commercial spirit reminds us that already in this age there were men who questioned the existence of the god Indra, perhaps because, unlike deities such as the Sun or Dawn, he was not to be discerned by the naked eye day by day.

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⁴ iv. 24. 10.

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⁵ The suggestion that the female figure on a gold leaf found in a Lauriyā Nandangarh tumulus is a presentation of Pṛthivī of the eighth century B. C. (CHI. i. 616) is wholly unproved and implausible.

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⁶ Cf. the list of his misdeeds, Oertel, *JAOS.* xix. 118 f.

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Animals, too, later at least, served as living fetishes: of this, the instances, though not numerous, are singularly clear. At the Sākamedhas sacrifice, in an offering to Indra a bull was invoked: when it bellowed the offering was made;⁷ the meaning is made plain beyond doubt not only by the fact that Indra is elsewhere called a bull, that in the Atharvaveda⁸ a bull is addressed with the words ‘Men call thee Indra’, and that Verethraghna, the Avestan parallel to Indra, has a bull form, but by the express assertion of the Brāhmaṇa⁹ that in the rite Indra is thus invoked to come to slay Vṛtra, and the bellowing of the bull establishes clearly the fact that the god has come with satisfaction to receive the offering proffered to him by the sacrificer. Another sacrifice, recorded for us only in the Gṛhya ritual, the Çūlagava, shows us water and food offered to a bull, a cow, and a calf, the two former of which are each placed in a hut: when they have touched the offerings, the latter are offered to Rudra, his consort, and the victorious one.¹

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⁷ Weber, *Ind. Stud.* x. 341.

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⁸ ix. 4. 9.

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⁹ ÇB. ii. 5. 3. 18.

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¹ HGS. ii. 8; Arbman (*Rudra*, pp. 110 ff.) wrongly accepts Haradatta's erroneous assumption of idols. See also BhGS. ii. 8. Cf. Keith, *JRAS.* 1907, p. 937; Hillebrandt, *Ved. Myth.*, p. 172.

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The horse plays a considerable part in this capacity, especially in connexion with the sun, which is compared to, and described as, a white horse, and fire. At the Ṣoḍaçin form of the Soma sacrifice when the chant at sunset is being performed, not only is gold held in the hands of the priest, but a horse, either white or black, is to be present,² clearly to represent the sun, and, in the case of the colour being black, to represent the setting of the sun. In the piling of the fire³ the bricks of the fire altar are put in place in the presence of a horse, which is made to breathe over them; Agni thus in person superintending the making of the altar, which is specifically his own. Even more striking is the participation of the horse in the action of selecting the clay for the making of the fire-pan: to the place where the clay is to be found, the horse, with a goat and an ass, is taken: the place where the horse sets down its foot is chosen as the precise spot from which the clay is to be brought. The verses addressed to the horse before and after the process are addressed to Agni, and the goat is also treated in precisely the same way. Further some hairs are cut from the goat and mixed with the clay with the words, 'I mix thee herein, the well-born Jātavedas.' The verses are conclusive, but the Brāhmaṇa is equally decided: it is recognized that the essence of the action is to bring the nature of Agni into the closest connexion with the fire-pan. The ass is not so treated, but is used merely as a beast of burden in the rite, and we cannot fairly assume that it was felt to be or ever was a fetish: it may, however, have been present for a magic purpose, the giving of virility to the performance as a whole and thence to the performers, but this suggestion cannot be pressed.

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² TS. vi. 6. 11. 6.

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³ Weber, *Ind. Stud.* xiii. 220 ff.

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The horse appears also as representative of Agni in the ceremony of kindling the fire from the firesticks,⁴ a task of considerable trouble: during its performance, a horse, preferably white, but, if not, then red with black knees, looks on to encourage the advent of the flame: when the fire is kindled, a horse precedes it eastwards, and in its footsteps is the fire deposited. At a certain point in the rite the priest speaks in the horse's ear, asking it to bring forth that essence of Agni's nature, which is latent in cattle. In this case also the goat may play a part: the goat is often connected closely with Agni, and may be used to watch the production of the fire in the place of the horse. Or, if it is found impossible to produce the fire from the sticks, it is permissible to make an offering in the ear of a goat: then the offerer must refrain from goat flesh: or he may offer on Darbha grass, and then must not sit down upon it. The sense is clear: the holy nature of the goat or the grass prevents its being treated in the normal way. The goat, however, is not merely connected with Agni. As we have seen above, it is at least probable that the goat was used in the horse sacrifice and in the burial rite as a fetish of Pūṣan, the lord of the ways. The cow also could serve as a fetish, and in the ritual be hailed as Iḍā and as Aditi: in the Yajurveda the cow which is given in payment for the Soma is addressed as Aditi.

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⁴ ĀpÇS. v. 10. 10; 14. 17; KÇS. iv. 8. 25, 26; 9. 13 ff.

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These are scanty enough remains of fetishism, and we cannot assert that, even such as they are, they are proofs of a wider extension of the concept at an earlier period. The fire ritual, which is richest in them, is precisely that part of the religion of the Veda which is most completely sacerdotalized: the use of the horse and the goat may not in the slightest degree be original elements of the ritual, but may be deliberately introduced by the priests who were the most devoted admirers of symbolism, and who not only found symbolism in every conceivable rite, but were quite capable of inventing the rite to contain the symbol. The Çūlagava ritual, which, as belonging to the simpler household ritual, might be supposed to be earlier in conception, is only recorded at the very end of the Vedic period, and at a time when the priests had completely brought the household ritual under their own control: its symbolism is entirely in accord with their modes of thought. Nor *a priori* is there any ground, if we do not accept animism as the first step in religious life, to ascribe fetishism to the beginnings of religious thought, and still less to hold that animal fetishism is especially primitive. It is clearly derived from theriomorphism, which we find in the Rigveda: whether animal fetishes were known in the period of that Veda, as we know fetishes of lifeless objects were known, must remain undecided in the absence of conclusive positive evidence and the impossibility of satisfactory conclusions from reasoning *a priori*. It is, of course, often contended that in fetishism we must expect to find, and so far as records are available, do find, a chronological progression from the inanimate fetish through the animal form, to a half human, half animal form, and finally to the human form proper.¹ This view corresponds with the theory, already mentioned, under which it is held that the first conceptions of deities are animatistic, then theriomorphic, and only later anthropomorphic, so that, for instance, the sun is first represented by a wheel fetish, then by a horse and chariot, and only later by a man seated in a chariot or alone. The theory seems, however, to lack any definite foundation; once the animatistic stage is passed, or even in this stage, whether man conceived his deities in animal or human forms appears to permit of no absolute reply; there seems no ground for refusing to admit the contemporaneousness of both ideas; we certainly cannot feel that Indra was pictured by primitive imagination as a bull more readily than as a man of superhuman prowess. As we have seen, in the Rigveda we have a definite suggestion of the existence of a primitive idol inspired Muni or medicine man is known as early as the Rigveda,¹ but it is not suggested that such a man was divine. In the later literature is found the idea of the divinity of kings: a king, even if but a child, is not to be despised, Manu tells us, since in him is incorporate a great divinity; but in the Veda if there are gods in earth they are normally the Brahmans, a view which may even be as old as the Rigveda, and which does not allow us to do more than believe that the priests felt themselves as in high degree sanctified by their close relations with the gods. The conception that the worship of gods at all was born from the worship paid on earth to the inspired medicine man² is not in itself a probable one, but at any rate it is wholly opposed to the Vedic religion as we have it.

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¹ Helm, *Altgerm. Rel.* i. 172 ff.

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¹ x. 136. 6. Cf. Chap. 22, § 9. For faint Vedic beginnings of royal divinity, see Ghoshal, *History of Hindu Political Theories*, pp. 27 f., and see N. N. Law, *Ancient Indian Polity*, pp. 116 f., 145 ff.

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² Murray, *Greek Epic*³, pp. 135 f.; *Anthropology and the Classics*, p. 76; Cornford, *Themis*, pp. 220 ff. See Warde Fowler, *Roman Ideas of Deity*, p. 39, and P. Ehrenreich, *Zeitschrift für Ethnologie*, xxxviii. 536-610, in criticism of K. Breysig, *Die Entstehung des Gottesgedankens und der Heilbringer* (1905); Hopkins, *Origin of Religion*, pp. 67-72; N. N. Law, *Ancient Indian Polity*, pp. 129 ff.

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When, however, we pass from the world of heaven to the world of demons the situation is changed. If the Indian believed in and worshipped gods of light and nature, he was doubtless in deep fear of countless demons who threatened men with every kind of evil, and who had to be combated even by the gods. In but few cases is it possible to reduce these demons to a certain natural foundation: the Gandharvas, who in the later Vedic tradition have a somewhat hostile appearance, are probable cases of derivation from a natural basis, and the greater enemies of the gods, such as Vṛtra, are doubtless naturalistic in origin. But this is not the case with many of the demons of the Veda, and it is a natural and probable conjecture³ which sees in them conceptions based on the idea of hostile souls of the dead: it is easy to imagine that disease and troubles which fall to the share of man can be deemed to be produced by the souls of the hostile dead, and, once the concept of souls causing misfortune was arrived at, the same principle of creative activity, which has been seen at work in the making of new forms of gods, would generalize the conception of spirits which brought misfortune.

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³ Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², pp. 57-9. Cf. for Babylonian belief, Farnell, *Greece and Babylon*, p. 206. See also Marett, *Threshold of Religion*, pp. 27, 28; Wundt, *Völkerpsychologie*², IV. i. 480; Helm, *Altgerm. Rel.* i. 33, 34. Both Wundt (pp. 462 ff.) and Helm (i. 30) recognize the existence of demons of the malignant aspects of nature, the mountains, the waste spaces, air, water, and even the house, a factor often underestimated. Another element is provided by personified diseases (Hopkins, *Origin of Religion*, pp. 74, 87).

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The idea that there are hostile spirits of the dead, which are the demons of disease and the bringers of ill fortune, is strongly supported by the very widespread belief in modern India that the most of the evil spirits are such souls of the dead, especially of men killed by tigers, or murdered, or who committed suicide through weariness of the misfortunes of life or other similar cause.¹ The idea is proved to have existed for medieval India by the evidence of such tales as that narrated in the Siṁhāsandvātriṁçikā² of a man who was betrayed by his wife and who died for grief at the betrayal, but after death used to come to vex her in punishment for her crime, in the guise of an evil spirit. Earlier evidence is that of the epic which makes out that the men who hate Brahmans in this life become Rākṣasas, perhaps in the Buddhist category of Yama-Rākṣasas, if their character is that they are evil men who become Rākṣaṣas on death.³ The Buddhist literature also knows Yakṣas and Bhūtas who dwell in cemeteries and Yakṣas who live in relic mounds. The Vedic evidence is not conclusive, but it is valuable: in addition to gods who were first men, and to gods by their deeds, who may be deemed to be the spirits of the friendly dead,⁴ we find mention of Dasyus, who, assuming the appearance of ancestors, slip in amongst the ancestors at the funeral feast provided for the latter, and we are told of Asuras and Rakṣases who dwell among the Fathers.⁵ In both cases the evil spirits must be deemed to be such as naturally consort with the spirits of the dead. In yet another passage of the Atharvaveda⁶ some kind of demon which infests the cowstall and the house is addressed with the words ‘whether ye be from the field or sent by men or be children of the Dasyus’, and the last of these conceptions suggests that the demons are conceived as being possibly the souls of the hostile Dasyu. Clearer evidence than this we really could not expect to find: for once the idea of hostile spirits generally was conceived it would be constantly and readily extended. There can be hardly any better example of this than the case of the Asuras: they are not in origin, as we have seen, enemies of the gods at all, but the Brāhmaṇa literature with monotonous regularity presents us with the picture of the gods and the Asuras being in conflict: the concept of the group of Asuras⁷ is thus in the main due to the creative activity of the religious consciousness of the priests. Older than this group is that of the Rakṣases, who become, after the invention of the concept of the Asuras, more specifically the enemies of men, but who are also enemies of the gods themselves.

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¹ Monier Williams, *Brahmanism*³, p. 239; Arbman, *Rudra*, pp. 156 ff.

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² *Ind. Stud.* xv. 353.

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³ Feer, *Avadāna Çataka*, p. 491.

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⁴ ApDS. i. 3. 11. 3; ÇB. xiv. 7. 1. 34, 35.

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⁵ AV. xviii. 2. 28; Kauç. lxxxvii. 16.

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⁶ ii. 14. 5: the sense of Kṣetriya is obscure.

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⁷ As enemies of men they occur in AV. viii. 6. 5; Kauç. lxxxvii, 16; lxxxviii. 1.

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In regard to a third group of evil spirits, the Piçācas, it has been suggested by Sir G. Grierson⁸ that they reflect human enemies, a race of cannibals, of whom traditions prevail throughout the medieval period of India, and whose language was the Paiçācī of the north-west. In principle it is perfectly possible that human enemies may be counted among demons, as well as the souls of human enemies, and it may be noted that the Brāhmaṇa⁹ tradition which opposes the Asuras to the gods, and the Rakṣases to men, also opposes the Piçācas to the Fathers, from which it might be deduced that they were in large measure deemed to be souls of the hostile dead. Nor need we doubt that some of the demons who are defeated by the gods were mere mortal men, the enemies of the singers, for there is no such difficulty in accepting the view that a living man can be deemed an evil spirit as in believing that he can be deemed a god. The rarity of the word Piçāca in the earliest literature is also to be noted, but on the whole it is more probable that the term was in origin applied to demons as spirits, not to an actual tribe of men, whence it came to have its demoniac sense, which is certain in the only instance of its use in the Rigveda.¹

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⁸ ZDMG. lvi. 68 ff. Cf. for the Rakṣases, Hillebrandt, *Ved. Myth.* iii. 426; for both, *Ved. Myth.*, p. 185. Cf. Macdonell and Keith, *Vedic Index*, i. 533.

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⁹ TS. ii. 4. 1. 1.

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¹ i. 133. 5.

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It is clear that the relations between the two species of divinities, the gods of nature, especially the lesser deities, and the spirits of animistic belief, must have been close in the extreme, and that there may have been a tendency for the latter sphere to intrude on the former, especially with the development of the belief in the transmigration of the soul, the origin of which we will have cause to consider later. Thus in the Petavatthu ² the spirit resident in a tree declares that it is not a god nor a Gandharva nor Indra, breaker of cities, but a dead man from Beruva, and the same text ³ places on the same basis the souls of the dead and the deity of a spot, clearly suggesting that the two are closely akin. These passages cannot safely be used with Oldenberg ⁴ in support of the derivation of spirits from the souls of the dead: the spirit in the tree in more primitive thought must surely have been, as the Vedic evidence proves, a tree spirit, and the *genius loci* was not, we may be sure, primitively merely the soul of a dead man.

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² ii. 9. 13.

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³ i. 4. 1.

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⁴ *Rel. des Veda*², pp. 59, 60.

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The demoniac spirits are naturally conceived in human form, a fact which is in harmony with their origin from the souls of the dead, but which would not in itself establish that origin. But they are also figured as with animal shapes,⁵ and, unlike the great gods whose forms are normal, they are regarded often as not merely animal, but of utter and hideous deformity. Or again in some cases they are conceived as a mixture of the human and the animal forms.

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⁵ Cf. for Babylon Farnell, *Greece and Babylon*, pp. 53-5. He (p. 74) points out that e totemism and ther剎olatry found by Cook (JHS. xiv. 81 ff.) in Minoan religion is in fact due to a grave error in taking fantastic representations for serious figures (Evans, *Ann. Brit. School*, 1900-1, p. 30; JHS. xxi. 169; Hogarth, JHS. xxii. 92).

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In a wide sense the term animism, which here has been employed to cover only the beliefs which are founded on the regard had for the souls of the dead, is employed to cover all cases of belief in spirits: thus the anthropomorphic gods are styled a product of animism, and abstract deities are derived from the same conception. The question is in the main one of terminology: by Herbert Spencer the term animism covers cases which we have classed as animatism, where personality is assumed without any definite theory of spirit. But it is by no means certain that we are to consider animism as the normal procedure by which we pass from animatism to anthropomorphism, if we are to consider animism as essentially connected with the souls of the dead. We cannot say that belief in the existence and nature of the soul was produced by the observation of the phenomena of death only: the dream on which Tylor laid stress, or the trance, to which Lang ¹ attached importance in connexion with the power of foresight, are sources from which the view of the existence of the spirit could be derived, apart altogether from the phenomena of death, and Dr. Marett ² holds that in the conception of the souls of the dead an additional element of the supernatural was added by the feeling of horror and surprise felt by the savage in the presence of a dead body. It is, therefore, perfectly legitimate and natural to hold that the transition from animatism to anthropomorphism was due to the development of the conception of spirit as connected with the living and not as connected with the dead. Hence the use of the term animism in this connexion is scarcely desirable, though almost inevitable.³

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¹ *Making of Religion* (1898).

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² *Threshold of Religion*, pp. 25, 26.

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³ Helm (*Altgerm. Rel.* i. 13, 14) adopts the term as denoting the recognition of natural forces as alive and ensouled as opposed to manism, which derives worship of these forces from the worship of the dead, naturalism indicating the view that the appearances in nature are identic with the powers man recognizes. Reville (*Hist. des Rel.* ii. 237) distinguishes naturism and animism; cf. Lang, *Making of Religion*, pp. 291 f. See above, p. 42, n. 3.

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