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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27.s5: § 5. The Materials of the Sacrifice

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27.s5

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§ 5. The Materials of the Sacrifice

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On the gift theory of sacrifice it is natural that man should offer what he delights to feed upon, and in point of fact this undoubtedly is the rule in the great majority of cases: the Vedic Indians practised agricultural as well as pastoral pursuits, and we find therefore that they offered to the gods, not only milk in its various forms, as curd or melted butter in several varieties, but also grain, barley and rice, which served to make different kinds of cakes, or were mixed with milk or curds to form variegated messes. These materials served to satisfy many needs, but the animal and the Soma offerings were of still greater consequence in the eyes of the priest, though they must have been numerically very few in comparison with the sacrifices of simple materials.

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Libations of water, not of blood as in Greece, for the dead were evidently directly connected with the conception of the thirst of the Fathers. Wild products such as wheat or sesame were reserved for Rudra, sesame grains were peculiar to the dead, and a puerile desire to assimilate the offerings to the gods appears in the rules that for Night and Dawn an offering of milk from a black cow with a white calf was appropriate,¹ that for the dead should be used the milk of a cow which has lost its own and is bringing up a strange calf,² that black³ rice is the proper offering to Nirṛti,⁴ that cakes for Agni should be offered on eight, those for Indra on eleven, those for the Ādityas on twelve potsherds, because the metres connected with these deities have those numbers of syllables, and so on in unending detail.

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¹ VS. xvii. 70; so often in magic; Henry, *La magie dans l'Inde antique*, p. 52.

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² AB. vii. 2; ÇB. xii. 5. 1. 4; TS. i. 8. 5. 1, and often.

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³ Red victims for the gods, black for the Fathers, are usual; Caland, *Todtengebräuche*, p. 173.

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⁴ TS. i. 8. 9. 1; ÇB. v. 3. 1. 13.

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The Brāhmaṇas⁵ set forth a list of five victims among animals, man, the horse, oxen, sheep, and goats: in practice the last three are the common victims, and the goat is the most usual of all: wild animals, fish, birds, the pig, and the dog are excluded; the last two were not eaten, the others rarely, but it is possible that in their case practical difficulties may explain their exclusion from use. At the horse sacrifice, it is true, enormous lists of offerings of all sorts of animals are enumerated: the rule is, however, admitted that the wild animals were to be set free, and it is absurd to suppose that the lists were ever seriously meant to be followed. On the other hand, the offering of the horse is contrary to the practice, for the eating of horse-flesh, though never in all likelihood unknown in India,⁶ and though practised by many peoples in ancient, medieval, and modern times, seems rare in India. It may be considered⁷ as serving either to make swift the god, who thus appropriates the swiftness of the animal offered, and through the god to strengthen the man, or as is less likely it may be held to be merely dictated by the desire directly to secure the offerer the strength of the steed, or again it may be due merely to the feeling that the highest beast is in place at a great offering: to this question we shall return again. In the case of the offering of an ass to Nirṛti the aim to secure the replacement of virility by the offerer is obvious, and reduces the offering to its real character, a magic rite dignified by the introduction of the goddess and the form of sacrifice. The offering of a fish-otter to Apāṁ Napāt⁸ is possibly to be attributed to the same idea: the otter suggests and creates the desired water, but it may also fall under the general rule of assimilation of the victim to the nature of the deity.

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⁵ Weber, *Ind. Stud.* x. 347. The Suovetaurilia of Roman religion have no precise parallel. In Greece we hear of triads of victims, the Trittoia, ram, bull, he-goat; Stengel, *Opferbräuche*, pp. 195, 196.

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⁶ Mahāvagga, vi. 23. 11. On this point cf. Reinach, *Cultes, Mythes et Religions*, iii. 124; von Schroeder (*Arische Religion*, ii. 374 ff.) believes that the eating of horseflesh and its offering to the sun are Indo-European.

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⁷ Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*¹, p. 356.

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⁸ Kauç. cxxvii.

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This practice of assimilation is obvious and natural: it is not indeed strictly logical that, because a god is said to be a bull, he should eat bulls, for the Vedic Indian never in any time known to us thought that Indra or any other god¹ was merely a bull, but the connexion of ideas by which, in choosing a special victim, the form of the god suggested the choice is plain and obvious, and agrees with the conception that by eating certain animals certain qualities are attained by men; by eating bulls the god strengthens his nature in its bull aspect. Hence we find that Indra receives bulls and buffaloes,² Pūṣan goats, Agni with his fire and smoke a goat with a black neck,³ the Maruts a speckled cow or a speckled animal because of their speckled mother,⁴ the ruddy Açvins a red goat,⁵ the sun and Yama a white and a black goat respectively, Tvaṣṭṛ⁶ a special kind of goat because it occurs in his myth, and so on. But we must not exaggerate the rule of agreement whether in character, sex, or colour. The Maruts sometimes have a barren cow or a ewe, Sarasvatī a he-goat, Mitra and Varuṇa a barren cow;⁷ in other cases the colour depends on the object of the offering, not on the god, as when a black victim brings rain,⁸ and a red victim is offered by a priest with red raiment to destroy a foe.⁹ It is possible, of course, that cases where the sex of the victim does not agree may be explained¹⁰ by changes in the ritual, which has altered the allocation of victims to different gods, but for this theory there is hardly any real ground, as the rule of correspondence in Indian as in Greek and Roman religion is merely an approximate rule, and of no more than empirical validity.

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¹ Cf. Rapson in Cook, *Zeus*, i. 718, and Cook's own doubtless correct view of the motive for the selection of bulls and rams in special as victims for Zeus (i. 634, 717, 718).

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² Hillebrandt, *Ved. Myth.* i. 231.

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³ VS. xxiv. 1.

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⁴ KÇS. xiv. 2. 11; TS. ii. 1. 6. 2.

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⁵ ÇB. v. 5. 4. 1.

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⁶ KÇS. viii. 9. 1; RV. i. 161. 3 (*basta*).

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⁷ Weber, *Ind. Stud.* x. 340, 358, 398, 394.

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⁸ TS. ii. 1. 8. 5.

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⁹ KÇS. xxii. 3. 14, 15.

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¹⁰ Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², p. 356.

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The victim has to be killed, so that it shall make no sound and so that there shall be no effusion of blood: it seems to have been usually strangled: the cruel method of killing recorded by Haug is not shown to have existed at any early period.¹¹ Stress is laid in the verse addressed to it on the fact that it is not really being killed. The omentum of the victim, a part rich in fat, is then extracted and offered up: thereafter the remaining parts are divided for offering, a rice cake is offered, portions of the remainder of the flesh are offered to the gods with formulae recalling the fact that the omentum has already been used, and the priest and other Brahmans eat the rest, keeping only the tail for the final part of the rite. The same division of the ceremony is observed in the animal offerings to the Fathers made at the Aṣṭakā offering, and the distinction must be very old.¹² The separate treatment of the omentum is proved for the Iranians by Strabo,¹ who explains that the soul only of the victim was given to the gods, except that a small piece of the omentum was put in the fire, and a corresponding distinction is to be found in the directions of Leviticus² regarding the sin and other offerings. It certainly seems to have been an early idea that the burning of the omentum made a sweet smell for the god: the Zulus burn it while leaving the rest of the victim untouched, believing that the spirits come and partake of it without leaving any trace of their feast. In this may be seen some evidence of the process of the transfer of the use of fire to its later employment as the normal way of conveying the offering to the gods.³ The blood, as we have seen, was left for the Rakṣases,⁴ along with the excrements, &c., of the victim, with which may be compared the practice of offering to the same powers oddments of the offerings of grain-stuffs, perhaps merely to deprecate their interference by this cheap form of sacrifice; but it is possible, as we have seen, that the offering to the Rakṣases must be taken seriously as an offering to chthonian powers of the earth, as is suggested by the fact that the snakes are often conceived as receiving blood.

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¹¹ Schwab, *Altind. Thieropfer*, pp. 112 ff.; AB. ii. 6; TB. iii. 6. 11. 1 ff.

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¹² AGS. ii. 4. 13, 14; cf. ApDS. i. 6. 18. 25. The omentum is the self of the victim (TS. vi. 3. 9. 5) and its sacrificial element (TS. iii. 1. 5. 2; ÇB. iii. 8. 2. 28; AB. ii. 13. 6).

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¹ xv. 732; Vendidad, xviii. 70; Catullus, 89; cf. the special treatment of the *exta* in Roman worship; Warde Fowler, *Religious Experience of the Roman People*, p. 181.

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² iv and vii.

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³ Oldenberg, *op. cit.*^2, pp. 359 ff.

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⁴ TS. i. 3. 9. 2; ĀpÇS. vii. 18. 14; AB. ii. 7. 1, 10; ĀÇS. iii. 3. 1; so in the case of the blood in the cooking of the heart of the victim (KÇS. vi. 7. 13).

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There is nothing here to interfere with the usual view that the sacrifice is essentially a gift offering, not a relic of totemism, or of the offering of a vegetation spirit or, earlier, of a spirit of animal life, in order to keep it ever young. No such explanation is at all requisite in order to explain the connexion of the gods with particular victims, nor to explain the silent death of the victim, from which the principal celebrants avert their heads, or the efforts to persuade it that it is not being killed, a device applied also to the tree which is being cut for the sacrificial post. The death of the victim is that of an animal with a soul which could be wroth, and also full of the divine spirit—sometimes so full, as in the case of the victim for Agni and Soma, that some would not eat of it—and it is a dreadful thing, therefore, to slay it, though necessary. Apart, however, from the place of offering, the animal is merely an ordinary animal, and therefore it is difficult to read into the sacrifice more than the theory of a gift, sometimes with magic qualities.⁵

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⁵ Keith, *Taittirīya Saṁhitā*, i. pp. cv–cviii. For the averted heads of the priests cf. the *capite operto* of the Roman ritual (as opposed to the Greek), which may be a sign of separation from the profane world (cf. Reinach, *Cultes, Mythes et Religions*, i. 300 ff.), but which may be merely a more efficacious means of escaping recognition by the soul of the indignant victim, as in the case where the criminal is veiled before execution.

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The question of the human sacrifice is of importance, as in it we should expect to find, if anywhere, the clearest recognition of the nature of sacrifice. Here, however, the material is wholly inadequate to establish any result. In one case we have perfectly good proof that down to a comparatively late date⁶ in the building up of the great altar for the fire ritual, a construction of such elaboration that it was doubtless a rare feature in the ritual, it was customary to sacrifice five victims, including a man, to build their heads into the altar, and to throw their bodies into the water whence the clay for the making of fire-bricks was taken, in order to give it abiding strength. Here, however, we cannot ignore the obvious fact that under the fashion of a sacrifice, last performed on earth by Çyāparṇa Sāyakāyana, we have dressed up the old practice of giving a building strength by associating it with guardian spirits of the dead, a usage which has persisted in India down to the most recent times. The other cases in which human sacrifices have been seen are extremely doubtful.¹ The ritual texts, indeed, and some late Brāhmaṇa evidence agree in describing a Puruṣamedha, ‘human sacrifice’, which follows but on a more gorgeous scale the horse sacrifice. We have no reason to believe that it was ever a primitive rite: the effort of Hillebrandt² to show that the passage in the funeral hymn in the Rigveda,³ which has been supposed to apply to the widow of the dead man in the funeral service, really applies to the widow of the king, who is supposed, as in the horse sacrifice, to lie beside the victim, is a *tour de force*. If ever the sacrifice was performed, it must merely have been an isolated act, produced by the speculations of the priests. There is clear evidence that the sacrifice of the mythical Puruṣa was in some cases at least taken as the model of the supposed human sacrifice. Possibly here and there myth generated the ritual: there is no conceivable reason to believe in view of the evidence that the ritual generated the myth.

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⁶ ÇB. vi. 2. 1. 39 ff.; vii. 5. 2. 1 ff.; cf. P. Sartori, *Zeit. f. Ethn.* i. 32 ff.

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¹ Keith, *op. cit.* i. pp. cxxxvii-cxl.

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² *ZDMG.* xl. 708.

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³ x. 18. 8; Keith, *JRAS.* 1907, p. 226; Oldenberg, *GGA.* 1907, p. 218, n. 1.

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More worth consideration perhaps is the legend of Çunaḥçepa;⁴ in it Hariçcandra the king promises to sacrifice his son to Varuṇa, if the god will give him a son: but, when the child is attained, he defers the offering until he manages to obtain a Brahman Ajīgarta, who consents to sell his son Çunaḥçepa for a vicarious sacrifice, the king having been afflicted by Varuṇa with dropsy and thus recalled to the sense of his duty. When the father binds the son to the post and is about to slay him, the gods set him free in answer to his prayer and he is adopted by one of the priests present at the rite, Viçvāmitra, leaving his wicked father, while Varuṇa frees the king from his disease. The sacrifice was to have taken place at the royal consecration and the rule is laid down that at the consecration of the king the priest must tell the tale, and thus free the king from all sin and the fetters of Varuṇa. It has been suggested therefore, very naturally, by Weber⁵ that we have here the trace of an old practice of human sacrifice at the rite which has been abolished, the tale instead showing how the practice was done away with. The story, as it is recorded, is obviously meaningless, as the king undertakes to slay the son which is sent to him, and the motive is as it stands therefore an absurd one.

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⁴ AB. vii. 13 ff.; ÇÇS. xv. 17 ff.; Roth, *Ind. Stud.* i. 457-64; Keith, *HOS.* xxv. 61 ff.

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⁵ *Rājasūya*, pp. 47 ff.; Hillebrandt, *Ved. Myth.* iii. 32, n. 3.

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The Brahman Ajīgarta fares very hardly at the hands of the narrator, and one motive in it is clearly the connexion of Çunaḥçepa with the family of Viçvāmitra. The most that can be deduced from it in favour of human sacrifice is that it is possibly a far-off and dim reminiscence of a possible offering of the son of a king in time of distress as a sin offering. Obviously such a story allows us to see in it other explanations, for instance that it is an echo of the slaying of the divine king or of his son in him—if so, a very distant and distorted echo, or that it is due to totemism. In view, however, of the lack of better evidence of any kind for totemism or slaying the divine king,¹ the piacular explanation may stand, if it is realized that the tradition is clearly so distorted that we do not know what it means. The conclusion is an important one: in later India there are not a few traces of human sacrifice, and offerings to Kālī have taken place within recent years: the aborigines had clearly no hesitation in following certain forms of worship which involved human sacrifice,² but the Brahmans remained, like the Roman priests, superior to this particularly unlovable peculiarity of the human mind.

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¹ Either in India or elsewhere, save piacularly; see Lang, *Magic and Religion* (London, 1901). In Çunaḥçepa's case we should have to admit the custom of sacrificing the son in place of the king (Frazer, *The Dying God*, pp. 160 ff.) and to hold that the king really wanted a son in order to save his own life, all of which is absurd.

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² For human sacrifice in Greek and Semitic religion, see Farnell, *Greece and Babylon*, pp. 244-6; for the scanty evidence in Rome, Warde Fowler, *Religious Experience of the Roman People*, pp. 33, 320 ff.; Cichorius, *Röm. Stud.*, pp. 7 ff. for Germany, Helm, *Altgerm. Rel.* i. 293; for the Celts, Rhys, *Celtic Heathendom*, pp. 232 ff., 675.

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The most important of all offerings in the eyes of the priest was certainly the Soma, as is proved by the fact that the Rigveda in the main is a collection based on the Soma sacrifice, though not exclusively devoted to it. The question of the origin and nature of the plant is insoluble: the efforts made to identify it have led to interesting investigations,³ but to no sure result, and the only thing certain is that the plant, which has been used in modern India as the Soma plant, is one which would not be considered by modern tastes as at all pleasant in the form of pressed juice mixed with water. We are unable naturally to say what would seem pleasant to the Vedic Indian: we know that surfeit in the drink had disagreeable results. Curiously enough too we do not know whether the drink was really popular outside the circle of priests, who took it sacrificially: there is just enough evidence in the Rigveda⁴ to suggest that it was a popular drink, though the normal civil drink is Surā. This beverage was made from a decoction of herbs of various sorts, and seems to have had characteristics which ally it to beer on the one hand and brandy on the other: that it was intoxicating is proved by the ill repute in which it normally was held, and by its very limited use at the sacrifice, in the Sautrāmaṇī, where it figures in the rite by which excess in Soma drinking is cured, and at the Vājapeya, in both cases in rites which appear to owe their present form to priestly action. There is, however, enough evidence to indicate that the corresponding Avestan Hurā was used in the offering.

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³ Max Müller, *Biographies of Words*, pp. 222 ff.; Hillebrandt, *Ved. Myth.* i. 12 ff.; Macdonell and Keith, *Vedic Index*, ii. 474 ff.; Brunnhofer, *Arische Urzeit*, pp. 297-301; Weber, *SBA.* 1894, p. 787; Pischel, *Ved. Stud.* ii. 217 ff.; Meyer (*Gesch. d. Alt.*³ II. i. p. 903) holds that Bactria and the Western Himalaya was its original home and therefore the home of the Aryans (Indo-Iranians).

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⁴ RV. viii. 69. 8-10.

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Oldenberg¹ is inclined to suggest that the plant was never very popular: that it really took the place of the old Indo-European mead,² and that therefore it was traditionally the subject of sacred use and appreciation without having any very real claim to pleasantness of character. It is possible that this was so, but it is not very natural, and it seems more reasonable to suppose that the mead of the older period was fully replaced by a really pleasant drink. The term Madhu, which is properly honey, is applied to it in the Rigveda, though not in the Avesta: the origin of the use is uncertain: it is especially connected in the mythology with the Açvins, and in point of fact it seems to have been originally offered to them in the Dadhigharma offering, though in the ritual as recorded the offering is practically confined to milk.³ It is possible, therefore, that in point of fact honey as well as milk might be mixed with the Soma, though it is also true that the term 'honey' in the Veda is applied in the most promiscuous way as to the milk or butter of the cow, or to the waters of the rain. On the whole, however, we are hardly entitled to doubt that the drink was originally a really pleasant one: in the course of time the long distance from which the shoots had to be brought may easily have made it less attractive, as it certainly encouraged the use of various substitutes described in the ritual text-books.

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¹ *Rel. des Veda*², pp. 366 ff.

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² Feist, *Kultur der Indogermanen*, pp. 257, 356. In Greece wine replaced, under the influence of the Thracian Dionysos cult, mead as a sacred drink. Wine and blood are closely connected in Greek and Roman ritual alike.

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³ Garbe, ZDMG. xxxiv. 319 ff.; cf. Hillebrandt, *op. cit.* i. 238 ff. Henry (*L'Agniṣṭoma*, pp. 472 ff.) thinks that the Aryans took over the drink from the aborigines of Iran, whence its popular but yet not orthodox nature is derived. Cf. Moulton, *Early Zoroastrianism*, pp. 70 ff.

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There is no ground on which any totemist nature can be applied to the Soma sacrifice:⁴ much as the Brahmans speculated on the question,⁵ there is no real proof that the offering ever really lost its true character, that of the offering to a god, in the main Indra, of the intoxicating and exhilarating drink, and the share in the drink by the priest. The killing of king Soma in the pressing, the eating of the substance of the moon, were no doubt seen by the ingenuity of the Brahmans, but these are speculations, not Vedic religion.

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⁴ Henry, *L'Agniṣṭoma*, pp. 470 ff. Keith, *Taittirīya Saṁhitā*, i. pp. cxix-cxxi.

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⁵ These speculations (Lévi, *La doctrine du sacrifice*, p. 169) have misled Hubert and Mauss, *Année sociol.* ii. 129 ff.

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In some cases it is true that we find alleged sacrifices of things which cannot be regarded as eatable or indeed of any use to the gods at all. In these cases the explanation is simple: a magic rite is dressed up as an offering: if a man seeks a hundred years, the normal term of life, and offers a hundred nails of Khadira wood, he turns a magic rite into a sacrifice *pro forma*:¹ similarly, if he offers manure to produce plenteousness in cattle,² or gives the sacrificer the strength of a lion, wolf, and tiger by mixing in the oblation at the Sautrāmaṇī hairs of these animals.³ Such cases are instructive as they show that the idea that the horse sacrifice might in itself merely be intended to secure to the sacrificer the strength and swiftness of the horse is by no means absurd or unreasonable, even if it is not quite a complete view of the rite.

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¹ GGS. iv. 8. 11, 12.

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² GGS. iv. 9. 13, 14.

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³ Weber, *Ind. Stud.* x. 350.

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