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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27: Chapter 18. The Nature of the Vedic Sacrifice

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27

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Chapter 18. The Nature of the Vedic Sacrifice

§ 1. The Sacrifice as a Gift

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As we have seen, the Vedic pantheon is essentially a body of great and powerful gods before whom the worshipper realizes to the full his comparative weakness and inability to exist satisfactorily without their constant aid. By the most simple logic he applies to the powers divine the same principle which he applies to other more powerful men, or which are applied to him by his inferiors. He seeks to propitiate them by the process of giving gifts.¹ Doubtless, beside this view of the relation of man to the gods, there existed the belief that he could do much for himself by the power of the magic art, which we need not doubt flourished as much then as in later India, and against demons of all kinds magic is freely employed, but the essential distinction of magic and religion is plainly to be seen in the whole of the Vedic religion. Often too in place of using magic, or still oftener in supplement of magic, the aid of the gods is employed in the battle with the demons. In the case of one of the higher gods alone is there any trace of other than a relation of friendship: the aim of the worshipper is to satiate Rudra and to avert his dangerous presence: this fact, which expresses itself in the ritual in many ways, makes a certain degree of difference between the case of Rudra and the other gods, though occasionally some of these, such as Varuṇa, show slight traces of a similar conception of their nature to that of Rudra.

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¹ This is recognized even by Feist (*Kultur der Indogermanen*, p. 351), though he inclines to trace all worship to the cult of the dead. Cf. Tylor, *Primitive Culture*, ii.² 372 ff., who shows the ease of developing the ideas of homage and renunciation from that of gift; Hopkins, *Origin of Religion*, chap. xi.

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The dead stand in a peculiar relation to man, since they deserve from him consideration and honour, but mingled with that conception is the fear of the quick for the dead. It is often asserted ² that the mode of honouring the gods is a direct imitation of the mode of providing for the dead, but the assertion admits of no proof, and must stand or fall with the effort to demonstrate *a priori* that all sacrifice or worship of gods is secondary, and dependent on the cult of the dead. In the Vedic, as in the Greek ritual, the nature of the cult of the gods and that of the dead is markedly and in important measure different,³ a fact which tells, as much as any such argument can tell, against the original identity of the two cults. This fact renders it at once desirable and convenient to treat of the cult of the dead together with Vedic eschatological conceptions in the next part of this work.

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² Hirt, *Die Indogermanen*, pp. 514, 515; Eitrem, *Opferritus und Voropfer der Griechen und Römer* (1915).

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³ Stenzel, *Opferbräuche der Griechen*, pp. 127 ff.

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In the Rigveda and in the later period alike the cult of the gods is marked by the absence of any temple or house of the god, even of the simplest kind. The nearest approach to such a conception is perhaps the fires of the Sabhā and the Āvasatha which in the Sūtras are mentioned as to be kept up by kings;¹ but in this we have merely an occasional use, and the Vedic ritual has nothing similar to the tending of a perpetual fire by Vestal Virgins in the house of the king as at Rome.² There is no public cult, merely the carrying out of offerings for princes and other men wealthy enough to employ professional priests, and the performance of a much simpler cult by the householder himself. The essential form of the sacrifice is one which can be carried out under these circumstances, and it reduces itself to the invitation of the god to come to the place of offering, and to partake of the food and drink provided for him. The gifts of costly jewels or garments and of chariots or weapons or other accoutrements, are wanting in the ritual, partly no doubt from the absence of any place in which such jewels and other gifts might be kept, but more perhaps from the fact that the priests considered it in their own interest to secure that these things should be disposed of most wisely by bestowal upon them. In so highly developed a priestly atmosphere as that of the ritual it is at least reasonable to believe that gifts, which an earlier piety might have conveyed by fire to heaven, were converted to their own use by the vicegerents of the god on earth, who even in the Brāhmaṇas claim the title of god for themselves, while in the classical literature it is assumed by the king.

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¹ Above, Part II, Chap. 10, § 1.

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² This fact very markedly distinguishes Vedic from Babylonian religion; the lack of temples assimilates it to Iranian religion, which, however, seems to have known fire altars of a somewhat permanent character; cf. Jackson, GIP. ii. 688, 701; Moulton, *Early Zoroastrianism*, pp. 52, 53. For the lack of temples, as opposed to sacred groves, in Germany, see Tacitus, *Germ.* 9; Helm, *Altgerm. Rel.* i. 235, 286 f.

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It was of course essential that the god invited should be received in a due place, and that any honours which were possible should be paid to him. Hence the hymns of praise, the sound of music, and the dance: even perhaps the theosophical riddles³ with which at the great horse sacrifice the priests delighted one another, and it may well be the god, since gods were built by priests in their own image. But in addition to these features there was much more in the Vedic sacrifice, mimic combats, ribaldry, chariot racing, archery, dicing, and much else, which cannot be deemed save in quite a secondary way to have been thought to be part of the entertainment provided for the god. In the vast majority of these cases the nature of the ritual can be solved at once by the application of the concept sympathetic magic, and this is one of the most obvious and undeniable facts in the whole of the Vedic sacrifice : it is from beginning to end full of magic elements,¹ which can as a rule be perfectly easily disentangled from the rest of the rite. In some cases it is impossible not to feel that the rite is merely magic dressed up with sacrifice, but in the majority of rites no such view is possible, and in many the magic element is wholly secondary.

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³ Bloomfield, *JAOS.* xv. 172; it has been suggested (Koegel, *Gesch. d. deutschen Lit.* I. i. 5, 64 ff.) that such riddles are Indo-European, but the best parallel from Teutonic sources is late (cf. Helm, *Altgerm. Rel.* i. 110 ff.).

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¹ Similarly in Babylon and less markedly in Greece; Farnell, *Greece and Babylon*, pp. 176–8, 291 ff. The gift theory of sacrifice is accepted by Baudissin, *ZDMG.* lvii. 832 ff.; Westermarck, *Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas*, i. 623. It in part is akin to the dynamic theory as accepted by Warde Fowler, *Religious Experience of the Roman People*, p. 184, from Hubert and Mauss, *Mélanges d'histoire des religions*, pp. 55 ff.; *Année sociol.* ii. 29 ff., for a criticism of which see below, § 4.

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The nature of the ordinary offering to the god is expressly stated to be an offering made to the god for the purpose of attracting his attention and good-will, so that, delighted himself, the god may reward in the appropriate way his worshipper. This is essentially the standpoint of the Rigveda where the sacrificer is promised wealth both temporal and in the world to come in return for his sacrifice, and his gifts to the priest, and where the gods are invoked to delight themselves with the offering and to reward their votaries.² The Brāhmaṇas bluntly state the doctrine of *do ut des* in so many words,³ and Suçravas, we are told, was approached by Indra, who told him he was hungry and gladly took from him the cakes of the offering.⁴ But the gods in the Rigveda are not less frank in their expression of feeling: they can sympathize with the poor man who can offer but little,⁵ but they are bitterly indignant with the rich man who gives nothing. The whole formula is excellently expressed in the Sūktavāka formula uttered near the end of the sacrifice, where it is said,⁶ 'The god hath accepted the offering; he hath become strengthened; he hath won greater might,' to which the sacrificer for whom the rite is performed replies, 'May I prosper in accordance with the prospering of the god.' It is, however, needless to multiply examples: this theory of the sacrifice and its result as an exchange of gifts, of strength for strength, is the fundamental fact of the whole Vedic religion.

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² RV. i. 54. 9; iii. 36. 3, 9; vii. 32. 6; x. 49. 1.

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³ TS. i. 8. 4. 1; cf. iii. 2. 9. 7; ÇB. i. 2. 5. 24; viii. 1. 2. 10.

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⁴ PB. xiv. 6. 8.

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⁵ Bergaigne, *Rel. Véd.* ii. 227.

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⁶ Hillebrandt, *Neu- und Vollmondsopfer*, p. 144.

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Beside this form of offering in hope of favours to come very small traces can be found of the offering which expresses grateful thanks for favours paid. The two ideas are clearly closely connected and to a generous people the existence of the one might seem to bring with it essentially the existence of the other. But it is clear that as in Roman religion the traces of the thank-offering are scanty and, though the idea is known, it has a feeble existence. A Sūtra⁷ prescribes such an offering for the case in which a man after falling ill recovers his health: the case is interesting for its simplicity: if a man falls ill after establishing the three offering fires, he should go away from his place of abode: the fires love the village and in their desire to return thither may heal him, in which case he should perform a Soma or an animal sacrifice. The offering of firstfruits,¹ however, is mainly if not entirely an offering to secure the safe eating of the new products,² an idea which is of world-wide extension. If a man has a son born to him ³ or attains a thousand cattle ⁴ he sacrifices, but merely to secure the health of one or the other; if he makes a vow and keeps it on the fulfilment of the occasion, as for instance if he says to a god, ‘Slay him and I will offer to thee,’ the keeping of the promise, which was not always done, is not a thank-offering.⁵ If the dead have a feast made for them when there is a birth in the family or a wedding,⁶ it is not according to the texts for thanks at their bringing about the good fortune: it may rather be that they are expected to share in the common joy, or that it is hoped to avert their envy of the good fortune of the house. The horse sacrifice ⁷ is indeed offered after the attainment of the position of a great prince, but the ritual shows that it concludes with a prayer for the welfare of the king and his people and the birth of a prince: it is in effect an offering to secure the maintenance of the success arrived at, a fact hinted clearly by the assertion of the Brāhmaṇas that it is fatal to a weak king to make such an offering.

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⁷ AGS. iv. 1. 1 ff.

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¹ Lindner, *Festgruss an Böhtlingk*, pp. 79 ff.

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² ÇGS. iii. 8; Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², pp. 310 ff.; Hubert and Mauss, *Année sociol.* ii. 96, 97; Lagrange, *Études sur les religions sémitiques* (1905).

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³ TS. ii. 2. 5. 3.

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⁴ TS. ii. 1. 5. 2.

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⁵ AV. vi. 111. 1; TS. vi. 4. 5. 6; AB. vii. 14. Vows of this kind play a very prominent part in Roman religion, but *not* in Vedic. Cf. Warde Fowler, *Religious Experience of the Roman People*, pp. 201–2; for Germany, Helm, *Altgerm. Rel.* i. 242 ff.

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⁶ Caland, *Altind. Ahnenkult*, pp. 37 ff.

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⁷ AB. viii. 21 ff.; Hillebrandt, *Festgruss an Böhtlingk*, pp. 40, 41; cf. Weber, *Ind. Stud.* x. 150.

§ 2. The Sacrifice as a Spell

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In the theosophy of the Brāhmaṇas it is an accepted fact that the sacrifice has a magic power of its own, and that it brings about the effects at which it aims with absolute independence: the old idea of the working upon the good will of a deity has disappeared, and in the philosophy of the Pūrva Mīmāṅsā,⁸ which is the logical outcome of the Brāhmaṇas, the idea of god is effectively disposed of. But the theosophy of the Brāhmaṇas is of no value as religion, and the question arises whether the Rigveda shows any real trace of the belief in the magic efficacy of the sacrifice. Much of the evidence which has been adduced by both Bergaigne ⁹ and Geldner ¹⁰ for the view that the priests claim to control the gods, to capture them in the net of the sacrifice, and make them do their bidding, is clearly without weight: the simple imagery of the poets cannot be pressed to mean more than it says. The later literature, which regards the priest as powerful to control the gods, openly says so,¹¹ and provides the believer with magic devices in order to bind hard the Ādityas until they yield what is desired,¹ and Kutsa is said to tie Indra up in disgraceful fashion,² but nothing of that gross kind can certainly be found in the Rigveda. The most that can be adduced are a passage where Indra is spoken of as pursued by the priest with milk as hunters the wild beast,³ a prayer that the mortal may be lord over Agni in his house,⁴ and an assertion that honour, Namas, is above the gods themselves,⁵ nothing more than occasional expressions of exaltation in the priestly power. Moreover, when the Vasiṣṭhas pride themselves on drawing Indra away from Pāçadyumna, they evidently assume that the god was free to choose, and preferred them to their rival.⁶ But, while the idea of the power of the sacrifice over the gods is merely commencing to manifest itself, there is clear evidence that the belief in the greatness of the sacrifice was in process of steady development. It is seen in such declarations as that the sun was born through the result of the sacrifice of Atharvan,⁷ and from the fact that the offerings of the Aṅgirases won the treasures of the Paṇis is deduced the doctrine that great might is that of the Soma-presser.⁸ The greatness of the sacrifice is also brought out by the doctrine of the first sacrifice of the gods in which they offered up the giant Puruṣa:⁹ from this sacrifice were born the hymn and the metre of the sacrifice: the idea of the production of sacrifice by sacrifice is precisely in the strain of shallow mysticism which is characteristic of the Vedic conceptions. That the human offering could produce results by itself is here and there, it would seem, recognized in the Rigveda, where the morning Agnihotra seems to have power to aid the sun to rise,¹⁰ and more distinctly in a late hymn the bringing down of rain is treated as if it were the direct work of the Purohita Devāpi.¹¹

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⁸ Gaṅgānātha Jhā, *The Prābhākara School of Pūrva Mīmāṅsā*, pp. 87 ff.

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⁹ *Rel. Véd.* ii. 229 ff.; iii. 164.

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¹⁰ *Ved. Stud.* i. 139 ff.

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¹¹ VS. xxxi. 21.

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¹ TS. ii. 3. 1. 5.

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² PB. ix. 2. 22; JB. i. 228 (JAOS. xviii. 32). The view accepted by Hillebrandt (*Ved. Myth.* iii. 291) that RV. x. 38. 5 really means this is hardly credible. Cf. *ZDMG.* xl. 713; Oldenberg, *Ṛgveda-Noten*, ii. 243.

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³ RV. viii. 2. 6; cf. iii. 45. 1.

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⁴ RV. iv. 15. 5.

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⁵ RV. vi. 51. 8.

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⁶ RV. vii. 33. 2.

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⁷ RV. i. 83. 5.

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⁸ RV. i. 83. 4, 3.

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⁹ RV. x. 90. 6, 9.

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¹⁰ Bergaigne, *Rel. Véd.* i. 140; Hillebrandt, *Ved. Myth.* ii. 83.

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¹¹ RV. x. 98.

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It would, however, be a complete error to assume that the magic side of the sacrifice is the primitive one, and that the whole sacrifice is really a magic performance. The sacrifice might well have in it *ab initio* elements of magic, and certainly the Vedic sacrifices known to us have many, but the Brāhmaṇas enable us to see clearly that the priests were determined to find in them throughout a magical effect. To every point some special working is attributed, and it becomes possible to secure ruin or prosperity for the sacrificer by the mere manipulation of some detail of no importance. All this is clearly the work of a later constructive religious outlook, and what is most noteworthy is not that, here and there, the same spirit is to be found in the Rigveda, but that it should play so small a part in that collection. Nor can there be any doubt that, in the course of the fixing of the ritual, many details must have been added or altered, simply for the purpose of introducing elements of magic potency: it is impossible not to see such influences effective in the drawing up of many of the details of the horse sacrifice,¹ which is reduced by the Vedic texts to a performance, which cannot possibly have ever been realized in practice, and in which the magic purpose of much of the machinery is plain and undeniable.²

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¹ Cf. Weber, *Rājasūya* (Berlin, 1893).

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² Roman religion shows a similar tendency to degradation into magic, though this fact can be exaggerated; thus Warde Fowler (*Religious Experience of the Roman People*, Lect. iii) insists that the magic element in Roman religion was diminished by the priesthood.

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A further question arises whether we can trace behind the Vedic sacrifice as a gift offering the older view that it is really not a gift at all, but an effort to secure the propagation of the life of the herds and of the world of vegetation by the periodic slaying from time to time of the spirit of vegetation, or in the case of animals of a representative of the species, in order to secure the freshness of the life of the vegetation and of the beasts of the earth. In this view, which is that of Sir J. Frazer,³ the sacrifice in the long run is reduced purely and simply to a piece of magic: it represents a period before man ceases to believe himself lord of nature, and master of all that he desires, and, recognizing the futility of his high belief in humanity, turns to the conception of supernatural powers, whom he supplicates for the results, which he thought formerly to bring about by his own magic powers. The substantial element at the back of the theory is, of course, the considerable mass of facts adduced by Mannhardt, and before him by Grimm, which illustrate the widespread usage of the killing of the outworn corn spirit, perhaps with some idea of strengthening it, though of late a very formidable opponent to that theory⁴ has appeared in the shape of the view that the thing which is destroyed is not the corn spirit at all, but the witches and wizards whose attacks on the crops are perpetual, an idea which is richly proved for India by the figures of the Rakṣases and their constant conjunction with sorcery. There are, however, features of the later religion of India such as the legend of Kṛṣṇa and Kaṁsa,⁵ which point to the old vegetation ritual in which the contest between the spirits of winter and summer is revealed, and this conception has certain affinities with the theory of the killing of the corn spirit when outworn. In the Vedic ritual, however, it is extremely difficult to find any case in which this theory can be applied with much plausibility.

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³ *The Golden Bough*³ (London, 1911–14); see my criticism, JHS. xxxv. 281–4; Lang, *Magic and Religion* (1901); F. Legge, *Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity*, i. 91–7; A. B. Cook, *Zeus*, i. 13, 776.

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⁴ Westermarck's view based on his investigation among the Berbers; see *Golden Bough*³, x. 328 ff.; xi. 1 ff.; below, § 4.

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⁵ Keith, JRAS. 1911, pp. 1108 ff.; 1912, pp. 413 ff.; 1916, pp. 335–49.

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One instance has been adduced by Hillebrandt⁶ which is of interest in itself. At the concluding bath of the horse sacrifice a sacrifice to Jumbaka is offered on the head of a man of repulsive appearance, who is driven into the water, and the texts make it clear that Jumbaka is believed to be Varuṇa and that the appearance of the man is intended to correspond with that of Varuṇa. Now the man who plays the part in this rite is said to be an Ātreya, bought with a thousand cows, and it is further mentioned that the formulae used at the time of the oblation include ‘To death hail! To the slaying of an embryo hail!’ and it is therefore suggested by Hillebrandt that we have here the trace of the slaying of a man, a view which was also taken by Weber,¹ who thought that the man was drowned in the waters. Hillebrandt further connects the story with the legend² of the proposed killing of Çunaḥçepa, who was bought in the same way from his father to be offered in the place of the son of the king Hariçcandra who has offered to sacrifice his son to Varuṇa, and he concludes that there was a practice at one time of slaying the old king and substituting another, the slaughter taking place at the end of the horse sacrifice. The theory is ingenious, but it is clearly without any contact with fact. The story of Çunaḥçepa is one which has no allusion anywhere to the practice of slaying the old king: it is the son whom the father offers to kill, and connexion with the killing of the old king could only be arrived at by supposing that, in view of the existence of the custom in question, the old king took the precaution of seeing that no son to supersede him was forthcoming, which is really absurd. The case of the offering to Jumbaka is also clearly misunderstood: there is preserved for us in a Sūtra³ an invaluable hint of the meaning in the statement that the guilt of the village outcasts is thus removed: the ceremony belongs to the numerous and important class of services for the expulsion of evil, and the ceremonial bath acts as a purificatory element rather than, as suggested,⁴ as a piece of vegetation magic. The hideous appearance of the man is explained by the same fact, for the Pharmakoi⁵ in the analogous rite in Greece, in whom have been seen by an amazing piece of ingenuity the prototypes of Adam and Eve, are also hideous, and the assumption that we have in the features of the man the imitation of the features of Varuṇa is an absurd idea, well worthy of the Brāhmaṇas. The payment is only natural: the priests were always well aware of the value of their services, and honesty must admit that they were fully entitled to expect high payment for the disagreeable duty of taking on themselves the burden of the sins of the village outcasts. The idea that the Ātreya priest was really once the old king thus vanishes into the limbo of practical impossibilities.

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⁶ *Ved. Myth.* iii. 28–33.

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¹ See Keith, JRAS. 1908, pp. 845-7.

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² AB. vii. 13 ff.; ÇÇS. xv. 17 ff.

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³ ÇÇS. xvi. 18. 21 should probably be thus interpreted; Eggeling, SBE. xliv. p. xl. According to KÇS. xx. 8. 17, 18, outcasts by bathing in this bath are purified.

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⁴ Hillebrandt, *op. cit.* iii. 30, n. 1.

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⁵ Murray, *Greek Epic*³, pp. 317 ff.; cf. Frazer, *The Scapegoat*, pp. 252 ff.

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It is, however, more important to consider whether such an idea can be seen in the horse sacrifice itself, not in the bath ceremony which is a mere appendix. The essence of the horse sacrifice is the slaying of the steed, which is treated with great honour, gaily caparisoned, and is invited to eat the remains of the night oblations of grain which, if refused by the steed, are thrown into water, doubtless because their sanctity is too great to permit of their consumption by any one else. Nor is it possible to doubt that in the rite the horse is really the horse of the sun; the steed Dadhikrāvan, whom we have seen to be the steed of the sun, is said to be the sacrificial horse. It may, therefore, be suggested that by the slaying of the horse, which is solemnly performed, it was originally intended to perpetuate the race of horses, and that later on, when the horse was regarded as representing the sun, the rite became a sun spell. It is right to state the possibility of such a development: the probability is obviously practically negligible. The same remark applies to the other cases of the ritual: if for instance the goat is offered to Pūṣan as it often is, then, as we must admit that Pūṣan seems to have been once conceived as in goat form, it is possible that the original offering was simply that of a goat, in order to propagate the race of goats, or at a later period of a goat as the representative of the corn spirit; but in this case also we would have to admit that the whole theory had been entirely forgotten in Vedic times, where the offering was in no sense periodical, and when the goat form of Pūṣan was far from being vividly present to the worshippers, while the gift theory of sacrifice remains for this case the most simple and obvious explanation possible. The horse sacrifice presents more difficulties, but none that are helped by the theory of the corn spirit.¹

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¹ Keith, *Taittirīya Saṁhitā*, i. pp. cxxxii–vii.

§ 3. The Removal of Sin by Sacrifice and Magic

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In the ritual of the sin offering the mixture of magic and sacrifice presents itself in the clearest way. The sin offering is only in essence a special form of the gift sacrifice: the gift is offered to avert the wrath of the god: it seeks to produce in him not the positive action of furthering the welfare of the suppliant as is normally the case, but the negative attitude of sparing the guilty man. In its rudest form the chain of ideas must be assumed to be that the food and drink will delight the god, and thus he will forget his anger: such a view is based on one of the most primitive instincts of mankind: the hungry man is unlikely to forgo his wrath, while the soothing effects of meat and drink on humanity, however just its anger, and moral its indignation, are notorious. Nor is there any doubt that simple sacrifices to avert the anger of the god, usually Varuṇa, were common: it is legitimate to suppose that the hymns of deprecation² of the anger of Varuṇa and of expressions of hope to be reconciled with him, which are found in the Rigveda, were accompanied by sacrifice: it would be very remarkable if this were not the case, but apart from that point the ritual is well aware of such offerings. Thus for the breach of an oath an offering is ordered to Agni Vaiçvānara,³ who may safely be assumed to have been the god by whom in the special instance the oath was sworn, and who therefore must be appeased if he is not to execute vengeance for the breach of faith.

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² e. g. RV. vii. 86.

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³ TS. ii. 2. 6. 2

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On the other hand, the element of magic enters very largely into the ceremony of the Varuṇapraghāsas,¹ the second of the four-month offerings. On the first day of the offering barley is roasted on the Dakṣiṇa fire, the one used for all ritual acts of an uncanny description: then a number of dishes of a porridge made from the barley are prepared, one for each member of the family with one over, apparently for the members yet unborn. The wife of the sacrificer is then asked by the priest what lovers she has; she must name them, or at least indicate the number by holding up as many stalks of grass as she has lovers, and by this action she purifies herself from her sins in this regard: otherwise, if she does not tell the truth, it will go badly for her connexions. She is then taken to the southern fire, in which she offers the plates with the words, ‘Whatever sin we have committed in the village, in the forest, among men and in ourselves, that by sacrifice we remove here,’ and further on an offering is made to Varuṇa, who is asked to spare the lives of his suppliants, and not to be wroth. The nature of the sacrifice is evidently in the main magical: the offering to Varuṇa and the consciousness of sin are there, but it may be legitimately be said that the essential part of the rite is the expulsion of sins by means of the magic rite, though due note must be taken that, as preserved to us, the other ethical element comes in. The burning of the dishes is of course essential, as they are laden with the sin: it may be compared with the purification by water of the scapegoat in the horse sacrifice, to which reference has been made above. In the course of the Soma sacrifice² the priests throw into the fire splinters of the wood of the sacrificial post, charging them with the removal of the sin wrought by the gods, the Fathers, man, and themselves. In the Sautrāmaṇī³ offering a vessel filled with a special preparation is allowed to float away with the sins of those concerned. In the case in which a younger brother commits the crime of marrying before the elder,⁴ the sins of both in the form of fetters are thrown into the foam of the water, and thus allowed to vanish. The washing of the mouth removes the sin of untruth for three years⁵—the mystic three or the unit one⁶ are most common in these statements of time—and the evil brought by an ill-omened bird can be washed away and removed by the carrying round of fire.⁷ In the same way are used plants,⁸ the Apāmārga plant seems to owe its very name to its uses in such rites, amulets,⁹ and spells.¹⁰ On the other hand, the intervention of the gods is constantly mentioned: Agni Vaiçvānara, Agni Gārhapatya, Savitṛ, Pūṣan, the Maruts, Viçvakarman, the All-gods are invoked to remove the evil.¹¹ The evil in fact is treated precisely like a disease, and is to be dealt with in just the same way. Moreover, as is natural, the concept of evil is of the widest possible kind: every sort of error in the sacrifice, every sort of out-of-the-way occurrence in the life of the home and the herds, such as the birth of twins, every sort of strange occurrence in ordinary nature, is made the cause for such an offering, and the Brāhmaṇas and still more the Sūtras pile up long lists of offerings under the rubric Prāyaçcitta,¹ a term which is not yet found in the Rigveda. The taste for such inventions is clearly one which grew with the development of the priestly system, and must from the constant number of such Prāyaçcittas, and the gifts to the priest which were enjoined as an essential part, have counted for much in the life of the priesthood. For religious purposes they are of little interest, since they consist in the main of offerings overlaid with magic practices of the most simple and obvious kind.

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¹ ÇB. ii. 5. 2. 20. Hubert and Mauss (*Année sociol.* ii. 111, n. 3) compare the Levitical examination of the adulteress.

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² Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², p. 325.

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³ VS. xx. 14 ff.; KÇS. xix. 5. 13.

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⁴ AV. vi. 113. 2; Kauç. xlvi. 28.

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⁵ AV. x. 5. 22; Kauç. xlvi. 50.

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⁶ TS. vi. 6. 3. 1.

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⁷ AV. vii. 64; Kauç. xlvi. 47, 48.

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⁸ AV. viii. 7. 3; x. 1. 2.

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⁹ AV. x. 3. 8.

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¹⁰ AV. v. 30. 4.

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¹¹ AV. vi. 119; vii. 64. 2; xii. 2. 11, 12; xiv. 2. 59 ff.; vii. 77. 3; ii. 25. 3; vi. 112. 3; 113. 2; 115, &c.

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¹ ApÇS. ix; xiv. 16 ff.; KÇS. xxv; ĀÇS. iii. 10–14; vi. 6–10; ÇÇS. iii. 19–21; xiii. 2–12, &c.

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There is another set of practices connected with the removal of sin which present difficulties, and which are only recorded at the very end of the Vedic period, but the antiquity of which can hardly be seriously doubted. The Brahman student is under a duty of chastity: if he fails in this duty he is required to make an offering of an ass to the goddess Nirṛti: his portion of the victim is cut from the penis: and thereafter he goes about clad in the skin of the victim and begging for alms, duly proclaiming his sin to those from whom he begs.² The husband who sins against his wife wears also an ass's skin and begs, proclaiming that he has sinned against her.³ The murderer carries the skull of the dead man, drinks out of it, wears an ass's skin or the skin of a dog, which indicates him as a murderer to all and sundry, and lives on alms, declaring to those from whom he begs the crime which he has committed.⁴ There are here obviously many and varied elements of belief: the element of confession is clear in all these cases: the wickedness is made less by being declared, a doctrine which is of course prominently exhibited in the case of the Varuṇapraghāsas, at a much earlier date than the customs reported in the Sūtras. A second motive may be the warning of others of the nature of the being with whom they deal; to a primitive people, believing in the physical transfer of evil, such a warning was a real necessity: this is parallel with the fact that the guilty generally are often ordered to remove from contact with the living.⁵ The bearing about of the skull of the dead and drinking from it is attributed by Oldenberg⁶ as possibly due to the belief that demons drink from the skulls of the dead, an idea which might of course be traced back to the reflection in belief of an actual custom:⁷ as the custom and the belief are reported to us both from the same late stage of the literature, there is no external evidence to aid in a decision. Oldenberg suggests also that it is the idea that the crime must be allowed to take the fullest control of the sinner, and in the observances in question expression is given to this rule. It is, however difficult to feel assured that this is a plausible explanation; it is required in reality only for the episode of the carrying of the skull, and this carrying seems in itself rather to be reminiscent of the carrying of such a skull, and the use of it for very different reasons, namely the keeping under one’s own control of the spirit of the angry dead,¹ modified no doubt in later belief often merely to an added insult to the memory and spirit of the dead. It is possible that in the rite which is handed down to us what was originally a habit of head-hunters had been reduced to a punishment of murderers. But beyond speculation we cannot, it is clear, go.

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² GDS. xxiii. 17; PGS. iii. 12. 8.

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³ ApDS. i. 10. 28. 19. For the use of the skin cf. Cook, *Zeus*, i. 422 ff.

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⁴ ApDS. i. 9. 24. 11; 10. 28. 21 ff.; GDS. xxii. 4; BDS. ii. 1. 1. 3.

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⁵ ApDS. i. 9. 24. 13; 10. 28. 13; 10. 29. 1.

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⁶ *Rel. des Veda*², pp. 327, 328.

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⁷ HGS. ii. 1. 7. Cf. the use of Vṛtra's head as the *droṇakalaça* in the Soma sacrifice (TS. vi. 5. 9. 1), perhaps also that of Makha's head (RV. x. 171. 2; Oldenberg, *op. cit.*¹ p. 90).

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¹ The head-hunting and preservation of heads were characteristic of the Celts (MacCulloch, *Rel. of Anc. Celts*, pp. 240 ff.), Germans (Müllenhoff, *Deutsche Alt.*, iv. 145), and other Aryans (Brunnhofer, *Arische Urzeit*, pp. 322–4, 372).

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The wearing of the skin of an ass or of a dog, which were both unclean animals ²—that is to say, animals of a peculiar nature—cannot be regarded as explained by the theory of Oldenberg, even if it could be given credence to any extent. The case of the student is here the most interesting, as it involves a sacrifice, and has the most primitive appearance: the dog was clearly in some ways a peculiar beast: nothing but the utmost hunger would drive a man to eat a dog:³ it is therefore quite possible that the wearing of the skin has no reference to any sacrifice, and the wearing of the ass-skin by the murderer may easily be due to the fact that the practice was customary in other cases. In that of the Brahmacārin the most obvious and simple explanation of the rite is that the virility of the ass ⁴ is its most marked feature, that the wearing of the skin and the eating of the special part assigned to the student were intended to replace the manhood expended improperly. The fact that the offering was made to Nirṛti then ceases to stand in special relation to the goddess, as connected with the ass: Nirṛti is the personification of dissolution: to her an offer might properly then be made in the circumstances, and, as often, we find the offering intermingled with the magic rite, as in the case of the offering to Varuṇa at the Varuṇapraghāsas.⁵ The wearing of the skin might then easily degenerate into an intimation of the sinfulness of the wearer, as it certainly was recognized in this use in the Sūtras, but that this idea is primitive is absurd. The case of the man who has abandoned his wife is probably the same: the magic power of the skin is to give him virility, and induce him to perform his duty which he has abandoned: it must be remembered that, as with most primitive peoples, and in the Roman Catholic faith of the present day, cohabitation with his wife is a man's bounden duty, an idea reflected in various Indian stories.

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² PB. xxi. 3. 5; ĀpDS. i. 3. 10. 17. The totemistic theory of tabooed animals may be applied both to the dog (as in the case of the dogs of Aktaion) and the ass (Marsyas as an ass) as has been done for Greece by Reinach, *Cultes, Mythes et Religions*, iii. 37; iv. 40–4. Similarly for the Celts, MacCulloch, *Rel. of Anc. Celts*, pp. 219 ff., without any convincing ground. Cf. Keith, *JRAS.* 1916, pp. 542 ff.

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³ Cf. Manu, x. 106; RV. iv. 18. 13 (a very obscure text).

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⁴ Cf. Reinach, *Cultes, Mythes et Religions*, iv. 29 ff.; Cook, *Zeus*, i. 626.

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⁵ That the ceremony there is really sacrifice pure and simple (Eitrem, *Opferritus und Voropfer der Griechen und Römer*, p. 136) is very improbable.

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The only other explanation of the rite which may at first sight seem plausible is the idea that the ass is the representative of the man, in that the man instead of sacrificing himself to the angry deity offers a substitute. We might, if we accepted this view, rank with this case the instances of the representation of the members of the family by the dishes in the Varuṇa-praghāsas, the offering of hair to the dead,¹ and the assertion of the Brāhmaṇas that the victim which is offered to Agni and Soma in the course of the Soma sacrifice is really offered as a ransom for oneself.² This theory, however, will not stand any close examination. The explanation³ of the hair offering is open to the gravest objection: it seems rather a mere mode of bringing the living into the closest possible connexion with the dead, through the medium of part of himself, without any idea that he either should or would give himself as an offering. The case of the dishes is obviously a case of simple material transfer without any idea of offering of the members of the family, and the victim for Agni and Soma is only said to be a substitute in explanatory and speculative passages, and even there the view is evidently not always accepted: its true nature will be explained later. The explanation in the case of the ass sacrifice is also most improbable: it treats the sin which is evidently by no means a very serious one—the chastity of the Brahmans was evidently of a somewhat mild order of virtue—as if it were a deadly sin, a conception not at all a favourite one with the priests.

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¹ Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², p. 323, n. 1.

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² TS. vi. 1. 11. 6; AB. ii. 9; KB. x. 3; ÇB. iii. 3. 4. 21; cf. xi. 7. 1. 3 (of the Paçubandha generally); Keith, *Taittirīya Saṁhitā*, i. p. cxiv.

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³ G. A. Wilken, *Rev. Col. Internat.* iii. 225 ff.; iv. 353 ff. For other views see Frazer, *The Magic Art*, i. 28 ff.; Gruppe, *Griech. Myth.*, pp. 913 ff.; Cook, *Zeus*, i. 23–5, 593. Cf. also Keith, JHS. xxxvi. 108; *contra*, Eitrem, *Opferritus und Voropfer der Griechen und Römer*, p. 387, n. 4.

§ 4. Communion and Sacrament in the Sacrifice

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While in the view of Sir J. Frazer the essence of early sacrifice is the magic art of perpetuating the life of the herds and of vegetation and even of man, the gift theory of sacrifice has also been declared⁴ to be merely derivative, on the ground that it is really a faded remnant of the sacrifice in which the worshippers eat together of the flesh and blood of the deity, thus renewing and strengthening the bonds between themselves on the one hand and the god on the other. That such a form of sacrifice existed is beyond all doubt attested for the Semites, but not for the Babylonians, and there are traces of it in Greek and in other religions.¹ It is not necessary to insist, as does S. Reinach, that the origin of such an offering is totemistic: it is perfectly possible without any such system at the base to explain it: O. Gruppe² treats this form of sacrifice as the oldest and most primitive of all, the effort to obtain directly and most effectively a share in the divine power felt in the world. But it is one thing to believe in the existence of the sacrifice in this form, and to prove that it is the only type of sacrifice, and unless this can be done the gift form of sacrifice must continue to stand as an independent form. The objection that the gift theory must be later than the communion and sacrament form of sacrifice, because the conception of private property is necessary for the making of gifts, is not worth the consideration which has been sometimes shown to it. It is obvious that, apart from all other considerations, it has from the first been possible to offer to a god material things without any precise conception of ownership having been attained.

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⁴ R. Smith, *Rel. of Semites*, p. 365; Reinach, *Cultes, Mythes et Religions*, i. 96; ii. 101.

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¹ Farnell, *Greece and Babylon*, pp. 241 ff. A good example of the common meal as a means of producing harmony is given in Kauç. xii. 8, 9. The same Sūtra (xiii. 6) prescribes a magic rite, in which portions of the members of some animals, lion, tiger, he-goat, ram, bull, a warrior and a Brahman student are to be eaten, to attain the possession of certain qualities; there is, of course, no totemism in all this; Henry, *La magie dans l’ Inde antique*, pp. xxviii, 87, 95.

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² Cf. Murray’s theory (*Four Stages of Greek Religion*, p. 37), which holds that the victim is devoured not as divine, but merely to obtain its *mana*, the divinization arising later.

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Now in the conception of the sacramental communion there are clearly present two elements which need not necessarily be combined. It is possible for the communion to appear by itself alone: the worshippers are imagined to eat and with them the deity eats, so that the deity and his worshippers have thus a common bond in the food which they consume: of this the Homeric sacrifice³ clearly presents us with a good example, while another is given by the Latin festival on the Alban Mount.⁴ In the second place, however, there may be more than this: the victim may be in some way divine: the most developed idea will be found when the victim is imagined as actually being an embodiment of the god for the time being, but it may be that the victim is merely more or less affected by the divine spirit from the fact that the god comes to the place of offering, and therefore that the divine spirit affects the victim and the place of offering.⁵ Of the latter idea there is a clear hint in the Homeric ritual of sacrifice of an animal victim: the barley seems to have been laid on the altar, and then brought into contact with the victim to convey to the victim the divine spirit present in the altar, and this idea is confirmed by later evidence, such as the sacrifice at Athens known as the Bouphonia,⁶ and apparently the same idea is to be seen in the sprinkling of the *mola salsa* on the head of the victim in the Roman ritual and of melted butter in the Vedic rite.

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³ Cf. Lang, *The World of Homer*, p. 129, with Murray, *Greek Epic*³, pp. 61 ff.

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⁴ Cf. Warde Fowler, *Roman Festivals*, pp. 95 ff.

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⁵ Cf. the worship paid to the offering implements by the Vedic Indian, to their *ollae* by the Arval Brethren (Warde Fowler, *Religious Experience of the Roman People*, pp. 436, 489), to the bells of their cattle and milk pails by the Todas (Rivers, *Todas*, p. 453).

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⁶ Cf. Keith, *Taittirīya Saṁhitā*, i. pp. cvi–viii; Farnell, *Cults of the Greek States*, i. 56–8, 88–92; Hubert and Mauss, *Année sociol.* ii. 107 ff., 65, n. 3.

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Now in the Vedic ritual, as in the Roman, we find a considerable amount of evidence of the eating of the offering by the priests, after the god had partaken of it. The essential feature of the ordinary sacrifice is expressed in the solemn invocation of the Iḍā,¹ the sacrificial food derived from the cow, which is repeatedly conceived in cow form. She is invoked to come forward, and she is expressly called a cow, and, when the god has eaten, shares in her are consumed by the priests and by the sacrificer,² in so far as he is qualified by being a Brahman to partake of the food. The latter restriction is one which we can only prove for the later period of the Vedic ritual, but the position of the priest at the outset of the ritual is such as to render it most probable that the rule was always in full operation in the historical period. The same practice applied to all normal kinds of offering, the animal sacrifice and the Soma sacrifice included, though we find in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa³ that the king is excluded at the royal consecration from the use of Soma and given Surā instead.

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The same rule applies to the Gṛhya ritual: it is laid down that a man should eat nothing without making an offering of a portion of it, every meal when an animal is killed for a guest is, as in Homer, a sacrifice.⁴ A Snātaka, or Brahman student, after he has taken the final bath concluding the studentship, is allowed to eat remains of food offered to the gods and to the Manes: in the latter permission, as in the rule that the wife, who wishes offspring, should eat a portion of the food offered to the Fathers,⁵ we must doubtless see the idea of placing oneself in close touch with the Fathers. In an offering to Kṣetrapati,⁶ in which the god is represented by a bull, the remains of the food are duly eaten by the relatives, and in another offering, the Madhuparka, the Rudras, Ādityas, and the All-gods are first fed, then the sacrificer, and then a Brahman: if there is no Brahman available, then the food may either be thrown into water, or the whole may be consumed by the sacrificer. The practice is interesting: it is clear that in the domestic ritual the rule that the only person who may eat the food is the Brahman is not in force: the sacrificer, who is the householder himself—and who may of course be himself a Brahman, but need not be—and his relatives have the first claim: after that the food which by its contact with the divinity is clearly specially valuable is either given to Brahmans, or disposed of in an effectual way.

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The ritual in many cases preserves express statements of the relation of the sacrificer to the sacrifice: if he does not eat a portion of it, he is excluding himself from it,¹ the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa says; but at the same time it is clear that it is rather a serious business: the hot milk in the Dadhigharma offering is expressly asked not to injure the partaker of it.² In some cases the idea of community resulting from the sacrifice seems clearly marked: thus the newly married couple, after their first entry into the common home, share food together from an offering made by the husband;³ in the ceremony of the initiation of a pupil the teacher gives the pupil to eat of the offering which has just been made, saying, ‘May Agni place wisdom in thee’;⁴ the sacrificer partakes of the offering of butter, which he and the priest have together touched before the sacrifice of Soma, and thus embodies in himself the idea of fidelity which was created by the touching;⁵ the mother eats part of the food which is given with ceremonial rites to the infant as its first solid nutriment,⁶ a practice in which Oldenberg⁷ sees the idea of securing for her future children the strength given by the rite to the existing child, but which is far more simply explained as a mere ceremony of communion.

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Possibly here too may be added the case of the ass sacrifice of the Brahman student which has already been noted: it may be conceived that the victim is made efficacious for its special purpose by the bringing it near to the god by sacrifice.

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¹ TS. vii. 1. 6. 8; VS. iii. 27; ApĆS. vi. 3. 8; ĀÇS. i. 7. 7; 8. 1; ÇÇS. i. 10. 1; TB. iii. 5. 8. 1; 13. 1; Hillebrandt, *Neu- und Vollmondsopfer*, pp. 124 ff.; Hubert and Mauss, *Année sociol.* ii. 81, 82, who compare the Christian Mass.

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² In Babylon the worshipper did not eat, though the priests might do so; they, however, did not eat with the god; Farnell, *Greece and Babylon*, pp. 241, 242. For Rome see Warde Fowler, *Roman Ideas of Deity*, pp. 58, 59; *Religious Experience of the Roman People*, pp. 172 ff. The idea of communion was seriously restricted in the official religion as in Vedic religion. So also in Iran; cf. Herodotos, i. 132, where the flesh is not (as stated by Jackson, GIP. ii. 702) eaten by the priests, but used by the sacrificer as he pleases.

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³ vii. 26 f.

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⁴ ÇGS. ii. 14. 23; ii. 15; iv. 5. 10, 11, 12.

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⁵ GGS. iv. 3. 27; cf. ĀÇS. ii. 7. 17.

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⁶ HGS. ii. 9; Keith, JRAS. 1907, pp. 939 ff.

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¹ AB. vii. 26. 2; cf. TA. v. 8. 12.

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² VS. xxxviii. 16.

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³ GGS. ii. 3. 18; MB. i. 3. 8; doubtless the same idea as in the Roman *confarreatio*.

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⁴ HGS. i. 4. 9.

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⁵ Weber, *Ind. Stud.* x. 362. It must be taken that Warde Fowler (*Religious Experience of the Roman People*, p. 181) is wrong in holding that the flesh which was eaten by the priests had lost its holiness, though in the case of Iran Herodotos (i. 132) gives the same impression.

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⁶ GGS. i. 27. 11.

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⁷ *Rel. des Veda*,² p. 333, n. 3.

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The same efficacy of the sacrifice is to be seen in cases where the offering produces its result by contact,⁸ not by ordinary eating. Thus in place of eating food together the husband and wife may rub each other’s hearts with the offering,⁹ and at the end of the three days of continence enjoined upon them the remains of the offerings are rubbed into the body of the bride.¹⁰ Similarly, if on the way to their home the car breaks, an offering is made, and the remains rubbed on the mended part.¹¹ The horses which are to engage in the race in the Vājapeya sniff the offering in order to gain swiftness;¹² the cows are driven so as to snuff the fragrance of the offering made in the fire;¹³ in the Soma sacrifice, the Vājapeya, the piling of the fire, and the Sautrāmaṇī alike occur cases in which the offering is used to rub the sacrificer to convey to him strength and healing.¹⁴ At the animal sacrifice by touching the victim the sacrificer is brought into contact with the sacrifice,¹ and when, in the case of an offering to Rudra, the cakes are hung up on a tree, the sacrificer should touch them and win healing power.²

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⁸ Hubert and Mauss, *Année sociol.* ii. 76 ff.

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⁹ AGS. i. 8. 9.

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¹⁰ GGS. ii. 5. 6.

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¹¹ GGS. ii. 4. 3.

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¹² Weber, *Vājapeya*, pp. 28, 31.

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¹³ HGS. ii. 8. 10; cf. SVB. i. 8. 14; for man, KÇS. iv. 9. 11.

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¹⁴ ĀÇS. v. 19. 6; KÇS. xiv. 5. 24; xviii. 5. 9; xix. 4. 14; Weber, *Ind. Stud.* x. 351; xiii. 285.

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¹ TS. vi. 3. 8. 1, 2; ÇB. iii. 8. 1; Hubert and Mauss, *Année sociol.* ii. 67, n. 1.

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² ÇB. ii. 6. 2. 16.

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On the other hand, when the deities to whom the offerings are made are terrible, it is clearly natural that the offering should be regarded as not suitable for human consumption: in Greece the offerings to the dead and the chthonian divinities were not normally eaten. So in India, when rice cakes are offered to the Fathers, the sacrificer refrains from eating them: he merely smells them:³ it is normally not right to partake of an offering to Rudra;⁴ if an offering is made for one who seeks thus to find death, at the consecration one should only smell, not taste:⁵ in another case, the Dhadhigharma, or offering of hot sour milk, the remains of the sacrifice may be eaten by priests who have undergone the consecration, but not by others who are less well fortified for the risk:⁶ it is the native explanation,⁷ and it is reasonable enough to hold that the mere smelling is a compromise between the necessity of partaking as normally and the danger of the action. The terrible character of the offering is further indicated by other usages: when an offering is made to the Rakṣases, to Rudra, to the Fathers, or the Asuras, or when an imprecation is made,⁸ the sacrificer should touch water. When an offering is made to the Fathers,⁹ in one case, the sacrificer looks north, whereas the quarter of the Fathers is the south; when he offers to Rudra, he looks south, for Rudra’s place is in the north, and the offerer is constantly bidden not to turn round after an offering to Rudra, which is explicable only by the view that the dread god is on the scene in bodily presence. We may here also include the theory, already mentioned, of some theologians that the victim to Agni and Soma at the Agniṣṭoma should not be eaten: it may have seemed to some that the presence of the gods Agni and Soma made the victim too dangerous to permit of close contact. But the general rule was that it should be eaten as is in one case expressly stated.

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