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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27.s2: § 2. The Sacrifice as a Spell

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27.s2

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§ 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.

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