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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27.s3: § 3. The Removal of Sin by Sacrifice and Magic

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27.s3

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§ 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.

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