The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27.s3.17

v1.c27.s3.17

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.