The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27.s4.42

v1.c27.s4.42

On the other hand, it was always possible to eat of even the offering to a dread god; thus in the case of the offering of an animal to the god Rudra,¹⁰ which is to be made in a part from which the village cannot be seen, we meet with the same phenomenon as has already been seen in two cases in which it is allowed to eat of an offering to the dead. It is expressly said that the sacrificer must not eat any part of the victim, that he must not let the wind of it blow upon him, that he must not take any part of it into the village, and that he must keep his folk away from the place of offering, all clear proofs of the presence of the god, but it is also stated that he may eat of it on an express injunction, and that then the eating will bring him great luck. It is an error to underestimate¹ the value of this evidence: it proves that the nature of the effect on the offering is to fill it with holy power, and that the eating of part of it conveys that holy power, which may be well worth having in some special cases,² though normally when Rudra is the god concerned men may not care to come too near to it. From this point of view also we can understand the true force of the fact that the blood of the victim was not partaken of by the priest and the sacrificer: in this Hillebrandt³ has seen a ground of distinction between the Indian and the Semitic theory of sacrifice, in which the blood is precisely the essential thing, which the worshippers desire to share, as is seen in the horrid Arabian rite reported by Nilus in which the worshippers eat the victim uncooked and take care to save all the blood, while in the Vedic view the blood is impure and given to the Rakṣases.⁴ It is not that the blood is impure: it is rather that it is particularly full of the divine power, doubtless as the seat of life of the animal, and the part into which the divine spirit can most easily enter, and thus is offered not to men but to spirits, often it is clear to the snakes⁵ as the representatives of the earth spirit, an idea which explains also the Greek theory of purification by blood: the person purified thus by the use of blood places himself in communion with the goddess of the earth.⁶