The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27.s4.50

v1.c27.s4.50

It is true that, as has been pointed out by Oldenberg⁷ and others, the theory of the sacrifice as a communion with the deity, whether by the direct rite of eating with him, or as a sacrament through eating a victim, which has become impregnated in some degree with the deity, is not recognized as such in the formulae of the ritual: we simply find nothing of the view that the worshippers are eating together with the god in order to renew their relationship. The solitary prescription above mentioned regarding the victim to Agni and Soma does not hint at this view at all: it merely refers to the theory which is several times expressed in the Brāhmaṇas that man is the original victim,¹ and that other victims are substitutes. We might expect to find the theory recognized in the case of the Soma sacrifice, when Soma was identified with the moon, and the Brāhmaṇas² do tell us that Soma is killed when he is pressed for the Soma drink, and that what is drunk at the rite is the moon, but all this remains merely an expression of the fact that the moon decays and is supposed to be drunk up by the gods in heaven, and analogously by the gods on earth, the priests who have the knowledge of the mystery of the identity of the Soma plant and the moon. The conditions which might have developed a conception of the sacrifice as a communion of men both *inter se* and with the god, and as a sacrament through the feeding on a victim which is really an embodiment of the god, were present only in germ, and they do not seem to have generated the consciousness of the sacramental nature of the offering, although the effort to assimilate the victim to the god was always present and effective. The victim was preferably an animal which was a theriomorphic form of the god, bulls to Indra, goats to Pūṣan and to Agni, and so on; the sex was assimilated and the colour chosen with regard to the nature of the god.³ None the less we must admit that, whatever the reason, the Indians of the Vedic period, like the Romans, differed radically and vitally from the Semites who practised the sacramental sacrifice in the fact⁴ that, though the animal victim might be chosen for its close connexion with the deity and in the actual offering be filled with the divinity, they did not in their normal thought press this view to the conclusion that the offering really caused the death of the god. Further, though the Vedic Indian recognized that by eating the remains of the offering he was bringing himself into close communion with the divine power and that the victim was in some sense semi-divine, he did not feel that in the death of the victim there was perishing some person essentially of kin to him, and therefore to be lamented, as the performers of Greek sacrifices in several cases may have lamented the victim, or for whose death punishment was necessary, as suggested by the ritual of the Bouphonia. Even in animal sacrifice there is no trace of kinship with man, though we have the clearest evidence of the desire to deprecate the anger of the kin of the dead beast⁵ and the recognition of the fact that the victim will have power to confer richness in cattle as acceptable to the gods,⁶ and there is no trace in the ritual of disapproval of the slayer as suggested by Hubert and Mauss.⁷