The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27.s2.31

v1.c27.s2.31

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