The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27.s5.32

v1.c27.s5.32

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.