The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27.s5.12

v1.c27.s5.12

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.