The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27.s4.10

Language: English

v1.c27.s4.10.1

Now in the Vedic ritual, as in the Roman, we find a considerable amount of evidence of the eating of the offering by the priests, after the god had partaken of it. The essential feature of the ordinary sacrifice is expressed in the solemn invocation of the Iḍā,¹ the sacrificial food derived from the cow, which is repeatedly conceived in cow form. She is invoked to come forward, and she is expressly called a cow, and, when the god has eaten, shares in her are consumed by the priests and by the sacrificer,² in so far as he is qualified by being a Brahman to partake of the food. The latter restriction is one which we can only prove for the later period of the Vedic ritual, but the position of the priest at the outset of the ritual is such as to render it most probable that the rule was always in full operation in the historical period. The same practice applied to all normal kinds of offering, the animal sacrifice and the Soma sacrifice included, though we find in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa³ that the king is excluded at the royal consecration from the use of Soma and given Surā instead.

v1.c27.s4.10.2

The same rule applies to the Gṛhya ritual: it is laid down that a man should eat nothing without making an offering of a portion of it, every meal when an animal is killed for a guest is, as in Homer, a sacrifice.⁴ A Snātaka, or Brahman student, after he has taken the final bath concluding the studentship, is allowed to eat remains of food offered to the gods and to the Manes: in the latter permission, as in the rule that the wife, who wishes offspring, should eat a portion of the food offered to the Fathers,⁵ we must doubtless see the idea of placing oneself in close touch with the Fathers. In an offering to Kṣetrapati,⁶ in which the god is represented by a bull, the remains of the food are duly eaten by the relatives, and in another offering, the Madhuparka, the Rudras, Ādityas, and the All-gods are first fed, then the sacrificer, and then a Brahman: if there is no Brahman available, then the food may either be thrown into water, or the whole may be consumed by the sacrificer. The practice is interesting: it is clear that in the domestic ritual the rule that the only person who may eat the food is the Brahman is not in force: the sacrificer, who is the householder himself—and who may of course be himself a Brahman, but need not be—and his relatives have the first claim: after that the food which by its contact with the divinity is clearly specially valuable is either given to Brahmans, or disposed of in an effectual way.

v1.c27.s4.10.3

The ritual in many cases preserves express statements of the relation of the sacrificer to the sacrifice: if he does not eat a portion of it, he is excluding himself from it,¹ the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa says; but at the same time it is clear that it is rather a serious business: the hot milk in the Dadhigharma offering is expressly asked not to injure the partaker of it.² In some cases the idea of community resulting from the sacrifice seems clearly marked: thus the newly married couple, after their first entry into the common home, share food together from an offering made by the husband;³ in the ceremony of the initiation of a pupil the teacher gives the pupil to eat of the offering which has just been made, saying, ‘May Agni place wisdom in thee’;⁴ the sacrificer partakes of the offering of butter, which he and the priest have together touched before the sacrifice of Soma, and thus embodies in himself the idea of fidelity which was created by the touching;⁵ the mother eats part of the food which is given with ceremonial rites to the infant as its first solid nutriment,⁶ a practice in which Oldenberg⁷ sees the idea of securing for her future children the strength given by the rite to the existing child, but which is far more simply explained as a mere ceremony of communion.

v1.c27.s4.10.4

Possibly here too may be added the case of the ass sacrifice of the Brahman student which has already been noted: it may be conceived that the victim is made efficacious for its special purpose by the bringing it near to the god by sacrifice.