The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27.s2.24

v1.c27.s2.24

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.