The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c19.s7.50

v1.c19.s7.50

While the snakes are the most lasting and prominent instance of a worship intended in the main to avert danger, it is of course possible that the common ideas that the earth spirit takes the form of a snake, and that the soul of an ancestor lives on in a snake which is about the house, had something to do with the sacred character and kindly treatment of the snakes. There are other instances of a temporary propitiation of animals, which might else be harmful : thus the Kauçika Sūtra⁴ tells of the making of offerings to ants, the white in the east, the black in the south, and so on : the ants⁵ are regarded, as we have seen, as important beasts in that they can find water everywhere, and in the myth they play the part of the means of depriving Viṣṇu as the sacrifice of his head. If there are worms in a cow, an offering is made to worms,⁶ and similarly an offering may in a case of need be made to the king of the moles.⁷ These acts indeed are not precisely of the greatest importance : they merely amount to the recognition of the power of the animals to injure, and the desirability of making them a present to appease their will to work injury : the precise parallel is the practice in Greece⁸ of offering something to the flies to deter them from infesting the sacrifice. The case of the frogs, who seem in one hymn of the Rigveda⁹ to be treated as having power to send prosperity through the rain which marks their awakening from their slumber in the mud, is obscure. The frog often serves in the ritual as a representative of the cooling water, and therefore this case might be reduced to theriomorphism, but that is less likely.