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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c28: Chapter 19. Rites Ancillary to the Sacrifice

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c28

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Contents

Chapter 19. Rites Ancillary to the Sacrifice

§ 1. The Consecration

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T<mark style="font-variant:small-caps;">he</mark> Dīkṣā is a rite which has to be performed by the sacrificer and his wife before the Soma sacrifice.¹ It is carried out in a hut near the fire: the sacrificer bathes, has his hair cut, is anointed, puts on a fresh garment, is girded with the sacred cord, and sits down on a black antelope hide, in which there resides, in the view of the tradition, holy power. His head is covered, an antelope horn is tied to his garment, and it is prescribed that, when he suffers from itch, he is to use that only with which to scratch himself. He sits in this condition in silence until night comes, when he drinks cooked milk, which is the food appropriate for the consecration, and then keeps awake all the night, or goes to sleep after commending himself to Agni to preserve him from evil spirits. He is also enjoined to stammer when he speaks, and to keep the three last fingers closed into his hand. Some authorities insist that he is to remain in this condition, until he is reduced to skin and bone and until the black in his eyes disappears: he is to be pure for the sacrifice only when he is reduced to complete exhaustion. The loneliness, the silence, the lack of food, are not however the only elements in the prescription: the heat is also indicated by the provision regarding scratching, reference to the sweating of the performer is made, and it is said that water will spoil the consecration, Tapas; the last term clearly means the process of heating, which is also said to be affected by any breach of the rules imposed. This Tapas is one of the earliest conceptions of the Rigveda:² the power produced by it is great in the extreme, and it marks out seers like the Aṅgirases; through it a poet can behold the old creations of the Fathers, speech is born of Tapas, which procures dreams and which elevates man to the state that gods may enter in. If the king wrong a Brahman, then the Tapas of the Brahman is capable of ruining him. Indra was borne by Aṣṭakā by practising Tapas, by it also Indra won immortality. Prajāpati before creation practises Tapas to bring about the desired result of power to create; it is a significant case that once the stars come from him in this condition. Already in the Jaina literature,¹ the common feature of modern Indian thought, the ascetic who presents himself to the heat of four fires and the sun, is found, and the idea of the connexion² of heat with creative power and ecstasy is clearly one of the most assured ideas of Indian thought.

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¹ Lindner, *Die Dīkṣā* (Leipzig, 1878); Weber, *Ind. Stud.* x. 358 ff.; Oldenberg, *GGA.* 1917, pp. 328 ff.; *Rel. des Veda*², pp. 397 ff.; Hillebrandt, *Ved. Myth.* i. 482 ff.; iii. 355; Hubert and Mauss, *Année sociol.* ii. 53 ff.; Hauer, *Die Anfänge der Yogapraxis im alten Indien*, pp. 55 ff.; von Schroeder, *Arische Religion*, ii. 249 (assimilation of sun and heat, rain and water).

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² viii. 59. 6; x. 136. 2; 154. 2, 4; 167. 1; 109. 4; AV. iii. 10. 12; xix. 56. 5 and often.

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¹ *Bhagavatī*, ii. 1. 65.

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² Cook (*Zeus*, i. 28) suggests that Herakleitos's doctrine of heat as the world principle is connected with Zeus as the burning sky or aether.

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The Dīkṣā has obvious affinities with the ceremonies, which all over the world have been used to spread that feeling of ecstasy which makes man akin to the divine, and of which the Bacchic rites of Greece present the most obvious and convincing classical parallel. The idea is found but rarely in the Rigveda but it is to be noted in one hymn of the tenth book,³ in which is described the long-haired Muni, clad in dirty garments, who claims to speed along with the winds on the path of the Apsarases and the Gandharvas, to have entered into the winds leaving his body only for men to see, and who, it is clear, regards himself as quasi-divine for the moment. In that case there is no reference to Tapas, but the long unshorn hair and the dirty garments remind us of the plight of the unhappy sacrificer. At any rate it would be absurd to doubt for a moment that in this figure we have a case of the effort made to obtain religious exaltation, or that the attitude is similar to that of the medicine man of tribes in a lower stage of civilization. It is not, of course, in any sense irreligious or opposed to religious feeling: it is the same spirit as that of mysticism throughout all ages and among all peoples. The discomforts of the performance are merely intended to melt away the solid flesh, which retards the communion of the spirit with the divine. The wearing of the black antelope skin is a practice which is especially enjoined on the Brahman student, and it is natural to see in it some special connexion with the power to be derived from wearing such a skin. The sacrificer wears a pair of shoes of antelope hide.⁴ The use of the horn of the antelope is parallel to its use for the pouring out of the mixture used for the anointing of the king.⁵ The parts of the offering which fall down are offered to the Rakṣases under such a skin.⁶ The actual intention is uncertain: the prohibition of the use of the hand to scratch is paralleled in many lands, especially in initiation ceremonies, and it is clearly due to the fact that the body is full of the divine essence, and that therefore contact with the hand is undesirable: a non-conducting material should be interposed. But the choice of a black skin also suggests that the idea of making the wearer invisible to the demons may have something to do with the use. The idea that the antelope is divine as a representative of any god cannot be proved or even made probable for this rite, and similarly there is no trace of totemism to be seen in regard to the antelope in Vedic literature.

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³ RV. x. 136; Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², pp. 404, 406; otherwise, Bloomfield, *JAOS.* xv. 157 ff. Cf. Hubert and Mauss, *Année sociol.* ii. 100; below, Chap. 22, § 9.

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⁴ TS. v. 4. 4. 4.

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⁵ ÇB. v. 4. 2. 4. For the use of the horn generally cf. Evans, *JHS.* 1901, pp. 135 ff.; Cook, *Zeus*, i. 506 ff.

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⁶ Hillebrandt, *Neu- und Vollmondsopfer*, p. 171.

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Probably enough there is here religious conservatism: the antelope hide is the natural garment of the early Vedic Indian, and the one worn by the student who is in a special condition of religious communion with the divine: these motives may go far to explain the use.

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There is, however, another element in the rite, which is emphasized by the Brāhmaṇas, but denied as primitive by Oldenberg. It is that the performance is a new birth, that the performer is reduced to the condition of an embryo, and the use of milk, the stammering speech, the clenched fist, are thus explained. There can be really no doubt that the ceremony was meant by the Brahmans to convey and to have this effect, and the result of the consecration in the case of one who was not a Brahman, was to convert him into a Brahman, not of course permanently, but for the time being. The Rigveda¹ is one place seems perfectly clearly to allude to the rite as making the performers born, that is newly born again,² and while we may, if we like, say that the older idea was merely that of the production of religious ecstasy, still we have no right to deny that the rite was as early as the period of the Rigveda carefully remodelled so as to suit the idea intended to be seen in it by the Brahmans. An explanation of the stammering speech is offered by Oldenberg as indicating the moment when the ecstasy seizes on the offerer, but, though this may be paralleled with the broken utterances of the priestess of Delphi and elsewhere, the other interpretation deserves preference.³

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¹ RV. vii. 33. 13; cf. AB. i. 3. 22, &c. Cf. also RV. i. 164. 36 ff.; Hauer (*op. cit.*, pp. 68 ff.) interprets the frog hymn (vii. 103) as alluding to the Dīkṣā, and finds in x. 106. 5 ff. specimens of the stammering speech of the consecrated.

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² From another view-point consecration is a death, JUB. iii. 9. 4; 10. 6.

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³ Keith, *Taittirīya Saṁhitā*, i. pp. cxiii–cxv.

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A very different theory of the whole rite is suggested by Hillebrandt,⁴ who relies on the derivation of the word from *dah*, 'burn', in place of that from *daç*, 'serve a god', or perhaps *dakṣ*—preferred by Oldenberg. He therefore thinks that the Dīkṣā was a voluntary death by fire, the desire to burn oneself to attain the heaven of Viṣṇu, and adverts to the suicide by fire of Kalanos of Takṣaçīlā, which is recorded by the Greek writers. He admits, of course, that this is not the purpose of the rite as known to us, in which the offerer had no intention at all of departing from life, but undertook the offering in the hope *inter alia* of prolonging his days, and multiplying his possessions in this world, but he points out that Brāhmaṇa texts⁵ lay down that the victim for Agni and Soma, which is offered after the Dīkṣā, is not to be eaten, and that it is a buying off of one's self, which he interprets to mean that the ceremony of offering this victim was ingeniously intended to redeem the man from death. The stammering speech of the consecrated man he explains in another way, from the offering of enemies to the gods, the stammering being the view taken of their strange and unintelligible speech. The evidence for this view is, however, clearly of the weakest kind: there is no trace of the practice of voluntary religious suicide in the age of the Vedas: the pessimism which leads to this suicide is not, in historic times, known in the Veda, and the idea that as later¹ captured enemies were sacrificed to the gods is without any evidence for the Vedic age. The sanctity of the victim to the two gods is much more probably to be explained by the excess of divinity embodied in it, in view of the greatness of the two gods to whom it is dedicated, both of whom must be deemed to appropriate it for their own, and it must be remembered that the explanation of the offering being a redemption is merely a priestly speculation, not finally held valid by the Taittirīya Saṁhitā.

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⁴ *Ved. Myth.* i. 482; iii. 354 ff.; (Kl. Ausg.), p. 138.

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⁵ MS. iii. 7, 8; AB. ii. 3. 11; KB. x. 3; TS. vi. 1. 11. 6.

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¹ So King Jarāsandha in the epic; Eggeling, SBE. xliv. p. xxxvi, n. 1. For German parallels, see Dio Cassius, liv. 20; Tacitus, *Ann.* xiii. 57; Helm, *Altgerm. Rel.* i. 293.

§ 2. The Avabhṛtha

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As the Dīkṣā is the beginning of the Soma sacrifice, so the end of it and also of many other offerings is the Avabhṛtha, or 'concluding bath'.² The word is found already in the Rigveda,³ and undoubtedly in the original sense, and the practice must therefore be assumed to have existed from the earliest period of the Vedic religion. The meaning of it is clear: it is the carrying down to the waters of the various things which are to be disposed of after the offering is over. The ceremony at the end of the Soma sacrifice is simple: the skins of antelope hide and the girdles, which the sacrificer and his wife have been wearing throughout the rite, are taken off, and cast into the water along with the utensils which have come into contact with the Soma and with the pressed shoots of the Soma plant. Then the two go into the water and rub the backs of each other: then they come out from the water, and thereupon put on fresh garments. The performance is made into a sacrifice by the fact that offerings are made and verses addressed to Varuṇa, claiming him as the possessor of many healing powers, imploring him to drive away hate, and to pardon sin. The bath itself is addressed as the cause of the removal of sin. But these forms are obviously mere cloaks for the fact that the washing is the chief thing, and that it concerns itself with the removal of the mysterious potency, which has clung since the Dīkṣā to the sacrificer and his wife, rendering them unfit for normal human life. That this was realized by the priest is clearly proved by the language used of the rite:⁴ the waters are distinctly said to remove the consecration and the Tapas, and it is stated that the sacrificer takes the consecration with him into the bath. The meaning is illustrated by the parallel procedure in the case of the undertaking of a vow of study by a Brahman. He then assumes a girdle, an antelope skin, and a staff, and at the end of the vow all these things are solemnly laid aside, and he takes a bath.⁵

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² Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², pp. 407–10; ĀpÇS. viii. 7. 12 ff.; xiii. 19 ff.; KÇS. vi. 10. 1; x. 8. 16 ff.; Hubert and Mauss (*Année sociol.* ii. 86 ff.) give Hebrew and Greek parallels and compare the concluding service of the Mass.

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³ viii. 93. 23.

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⁴ MS. iii. 6. 2; ĀpÇS. xiii. 21. 3.

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⁵ HGS. i. 7. 8; 9. 8–10.

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The nature of the bath is further elucidated by the fact that through the performance of ablutions in it the waters become charged with magic potency and power: thus at the end of the bath at the horse sacrifice, those who go in, though evil doers, are released from all their sins.¹ The bath too serves as the mode of driving out evil in a curious rite, which is recorded of the same sacrifice:² a man is driven into the water up to his mouth, and on his head offerings are made to Jumbaka, to death, and to the slaying of an embryo: the man is of an ugly appearance, and is said in the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa to be the symbol of Varuṇa. It is clear from the notice of a Sūtra that the real meaning of the ceremony, which ends with the man being driven away, is that he is a scapegoat, who bears with him the sins of the community, but who is also purified from them in some measure by the driving into the water. The offering on his head may well be derived from the mere mode of transferring³ the sin by touching him on such a part as the head, or merely be based on the fact that an offering to Varuṇa was an essential part of the rite for the priest, and that the obvious place to make it was in the man who had the sins of the people upon him. That a human sacrifice is meant, as was imagined by Weber,⁴ who thought that the potency of the bath to remit sin was due to this, is obviously wrong: there is no trace in any of the texts of the death of the man, who is on the contrary clearly driven away⁵ as an essential part of the rite.

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¹ Above, Part III, Chap. 18, § 2; KÇS. xx. 8. 17, 18.

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² ÇB. xiii. 3. 6. 5; TB. iii. 9. 15.

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³ So in the ancient Hebrew rite of consecrating a thing the touching by the people was the essential element; Wellhausen, *Archiv f. Religionswissenschaft*, vii. 33–39.

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⁴ See Eggeling, SBE. xliv. p. xl.

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⁵ ÇÇS. xvi. 18. 20; the expulsion was not in all likelihood permanent, though Eggeling thinks he may have been expected to live an anchorite's life. But he had been bought to perform the rite for 1,000 cows: so, if he went away, he would probably not trouble about asceticism.

§ 3. Taboos

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While the bath has the power of removing what is attached to a man's person, and thus is often used before undertaking a rite, as before the Dīkṣā itself by the sacrificer, by bridegroom and bride before marriage, and by a woman after the spell to produce offspring has been performed for her,⁶ it is also necessary to avoid its use to prevent the removal of the holy power, which has been attained by some means or other. The theory would therefore demand that, after the initiation of the Brahman student, he should not take a bath until the final bath, so as to preserve his undoubted condition of holiness to the end, as the sacrificer can do in the case of the sacrifice, but obvious practical considerations rendered it impossible to carry that out in the times recorded for us. Though the more recent ascetics in India often never wash at all, and the seclusion of girls from ordinary life before and during puberty is practised for long periods in some lands, the use of the bath was not normally in the slightest degree forbidden to the Vedic student.⁷ But we hear of cases where the theory was worked out: in the case¹ of the period of a year connected with the ceremony of cutting the beard of the youth, which is introduced by a ceremony comparable to the initiation to studentship and during which the carrying of a girdle, the living on alms, and so on are prescribed as for a student, washing, combing the hair, cleaning the teeth, and washing the feet are forbidden. In the case of the four-month ceremonies,² it is a rule of perfection, at least, that the performer should not bathe until the final bath. The sense is clear, and throws light on the famous reference in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa³ to the dirty condition of the ascetic, which is also echoed in the hymn of the Ṛgveda⁴ regarding the inspired Muni.

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⁶ KÇS. vii. 2. 15, &c.

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⁷ BDS. i. 2. 3. 39; GDS. ii. 8, &c.

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¹ GGS. iii. 1. 10 ff.

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² KÇS. v. 2. 21.

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³ AB. vii. 13.

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⁴ x. 136.

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The case of the hair is analogous to, and closely connected with, that of the washing or refraining from washing the body. The Vedic domestic ritual lays stress on the cutting of the child’s hair once in early childhood, and then later for the youth when he has grown up: the hair is carefully cut, and after that was arranged in the characteristic manner in which the family wore its hair, this being a marked sign of differentiation among the Vedic families and one already recorded to us in the Ṛgveda; the beard of the youth was also shorn.⁵ The aim of the performance is expressly stated in the formulae accompanying it to be the production of long life, and the giving of health and purity, and obviously it served also to mark the family connexion of the child or youth. That in the ceremony there was any idea of an offering whether to gods, or to demons, or to the Fathers⁶ is not indicated by anything in the ritual texts nor in the formulae used, and, if any such idea was ever present, it was not felt in Vedic times. There is indeed no obvious reason for distinguishing the action in these cases from the action in the cases of sacrifices. The sacrificer before the new- and full-moon offerings has his hair cut, except the family knot, and his beard shaven, and even his nails pared: so the sacrificer in the case of the Dīkṣā, and at the four-monthly offerings, and the motive expressed in these cases is the removal of the dead skin to make the body pure.⁷ The same principle of shaving was observed by the living after the death of a member of the family,⁸ at the same time as the putting on of new garments, the renewal of the domestic fire, and the washing of their bodies. The same performances were applied as in all lands to the dead:⁹ perhaps we can say nothing more than that the feeling of impurity from contact with the dead was very strong, and required to be removed as vehemently as possible.

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⁵ AGS. i. 17. 12, 16; 18. 5; GDS. xx. 5. For Greek parallels see Cook, *Zeus*, i. 23–5, 93. For peculiarities of arrangement of hair as characteristic of tribes and families cf. Ridgeway, *Anthropological Essays presented to E. B. Tylor*, p. 305; Hillebrandt, *Rituallitteratur*, pp. 7, 8. For the soul in the hair, see Hopkins, *Origin of Religion*, pp. 116 ff.

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⁶ Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*¹, p. 426.

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⁷ ÇB. iii. 1. 2. 1; MS. iii. 6. 2.

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⁸ AGS. iv. 6. 4.

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⁹ AGS. iv. 1. 16; AV. xix. 32. 2.

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On the other hand, as in the case of abstaining from washing, so we have instances in which the hair must not be cut at all. The newly wedded bride on the fourth day, before the consummation of the marriage is permitted, must be rubbed with an ointment from the remains of oblations up to the nails and the hair.¹ The ascetic of the Rigveda wears long hair; the description of the attributes of asceticism in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa include dirt, long hair, a girdle, and an antelope skin. In the period of a year before the shaving of the beard referred to above the hair may not be cut. In the royal consecration the sacrifice is followed by period of a year in which the consecrated may rub but not wash himself, shorten, but not cut off the hair.² The reason for the usage is given with perfect distinctness by the Brāhmaṇa : the anointing has put the strength of the waters of anointing into his hair, and he would destroy the virtue thus engendered, if he cut off the hair. The same principle is applied to the animals of the sacrifice : the steed for the horse sacrifice must not, for the year in which it wanders free before its death, be allowed to bathe in water, and the manes of the horses in the realm should not be cut for a year after the royal consecration.³ Naturally the end of the period of allowing the hair to grow is marked by a formal act of shaving : this is the case with the man consecrated by the Dīkṣā, with the king at the end of the year of consecration; at the Samāvartana ceremony, which ends the period of studentship, the hair, the beard, the hair on the body, and the nails are all carefully cut.⁴

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¹ GGS. ii. 5. 6.

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² LÇS. ix. 2. 18, 21; ÇB. v. 5. 3. 1; KÇS. xv. 8. 28.

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³ KÇS. xx. 2. 12, 13; LÇS. ix. 2. 26. In Persia we have an obscure record (Herodotos, ix. 110) of an annual hair washing (?) by the King, with which Strabo's (xv. 69) remark as to a similar Indian practice has been compared, and far-reaching conclusions as to Persian influence on Candragupta's court drawn but with little cogency; cf. Keith, JRAS. 1916, pp. 138–43.

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⁴ ĀpÇS. xiii. 23. 16; ÇGS. iii. 1. 2.

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In a considerable number of cases we find that at certain times the intending sacrificer must abstain from sexual intercourse, must fast, or feed on certain specified foods alone, must sleep on the ground, and so on. The man who intends to establish the sacred fire must for the night before the performance lie awake in silence : ⁵ thus he is said to secure purity and Tapas for his approach to the gods next day. For the day before the new- and full-moon sacrifices the sacrificer must be careful not to eat meat or have sexual intercourse; at evening he may eat wild plants and fruits, but nothing of what he is to offer next day; he must sleep on the ground with his wife for the night, and some even demand that the pair shall spend it in telling stories.⁶

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⁵ ĀpÇS. v. 8. 1 ff.

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⁶ Hillebrandt, *Neu- und Vollmopndsopfer*, pp. 3, 6, 14.

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When the student is performing his period of studentship,⁷ he is forbidden intercourse, and a high bed : when he has been admitted to study ⁸ by the solemn offering, he must stand silent for the rest of the day, and eat no salted food for the day. When he comes to a specially sacred part of his work of learning, then he must shut his eyes, and in silence for a day and a night or three days eat nothing, the shutting of the eyes being no doubt in order not to be blinded by the excessive majesty of the work, which he has studied. Before he imparts such important knowledge to his pupil, the teacher himself for a day and a night must practise chastity, and eat no flesh.¹ In the offering of the Çabalihoma it is provided that the offerer must lie on the ground for twelve nights, speak as little as possible, observe chastity, and take only sweet milk.² The fasts are deemed by the Brāhmaṇas to be the essence of Tapas,³ or again the fasting before an offering is deemed courtesy to the gods, just as one does not eat before one's guests.⁴ The former motive is very probably a real one : the use of hunger to produce states of ecstasy is well attested, but other reasons are possible : the motive of refraining from eating flesh is doubtless connected with the spirit, which is in the dead animal, and which may be dangerous, especially to a man undertaking a solemn rite. The refraining from salt, which is even extended by some authorities to cover the offering of any salted food to the gods, is a strange taboo which is very well known in many parts of the earth, and which in some way seems to stand in connexion with fertility : Oldenberg⁵ suggests that if it is not an inheritance from a time which knew no salt, as is very possible, the unfruitfulness of salt ground and of sea water suggested its evil character, but of that we have no adequate proof, and in point of fact salt passes in some measure as a sign of prosperity,⁶ through its use for animals to lick. Other motives may be the danger of evil spirits entering the man who eats, seeing that at a festival such spirits will be present in large numbers ; the desire to secure that there will be enough food for the gods—which is paralleled by the Vedic politeness theory ; or the desire not to interfere with the full benefit to be obtained by the holy food, which is not expressed in any Vedic passage, but with which may be compared fasts ordered after consuming forbidden food until all trace of it has disappeared.⁷ In the case of sexual intercourse probably the same idea is at work as in the case of the loss of seed generally : the horse for the horse sacrifice is kept away from mares as well as from the water, and the motive appears clearly enough in the ritual and the formulae :⁸ it is undesirable in this case as in the case of the Brahman student and the consecrated man to lose any strength whatever. Even laughter⁹ is regarded as loss of strength : the consecrated man must put his hand before his mouth to prevent the loss of his laughter, which is compared with light on the strength of the Rigveda,¹⁰ by which laughter and lightning are already closely connected.

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⁷ GGS. iii. 1. 17 ff.

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⁸ GGS. ii. 10. 45 ff.

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¹ GGS. iii. 2. 37 ; ÇGS. ii. 11. 6.

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² Weber, *Ind. Stud.* v. 440 ff.

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³ ÇB. ix. 5. 1. 6.

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⁴ ÇB. i. 1. 1. 8 ; ii. 1. 4. 1, 2.

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⁵ *Rel. des Veda*², p. 414, n. 1.

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⁶ ÇB. v. 2. 1. 16.

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⁷ ApDS. i. 9. 27. 3 ; GDS. xxiii. 23.

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⁸ ÇB. xiii. 3. 8. 1 ; TB. iii. 9. 17. 4 ; TA. i. 30 ; ii. 18 ; KÇS. xxv. 11. 21 ; AGS. iii. 6. 8 ; Vait. xii. 9.

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⁹ TA. v. 1. 4 ; contrast TS. vi. 1. 3. 8.

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¹⁰ Oldenberg, *op. cit.*, p. 429. For the lucky sneeze (*āṣkāra*), see PB. viii. 1. 1 ; 2. 2.

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In addition to these taboos there are others of more curious character.

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When the ground is ploughed for a fire altar, there are sowed upon it seeds of every kind except one, and of that the sacrificer never tastes again in his life.¹ If a man use a goat or Kuça grass as a fetish of the fire, then he must not eat either the goat or sit on Kuça grass ; ² if a man takes his fire from the house of a wealthy man, he may not again eat in his house ; ³ at the Vājapeya the sacrificer is anointed, or deluged, with various libations, in preparing which all kinds of food are mixed with water, one only being excepted of which he never eats again.⁴ The builder of the fire altar in bird form must not again eat a bird in his life,⁵ and the same rule is laid down for the learner of the Jyeṣṭha Sāman.⁶ To see here traces of totemism is of course possible, but like all possibilities, which have no evidence to raise them into probabilities, not a very helpful mode of procedure. The case of the altar is clearly due to its bird form : the bird is invested with the holiness of Agni, and must not be eaten by a man who is closely connected with Agni, as is the builder of the fire altar. The borrowing of the same taboo by the learner of the Jyeṣṭha Sāman must not mislead us : once a taboo starts, others easily follow. The idea that the taboos represent an agreement with spirits to abstain from one food, in return for being allowed to use others, is one which has no support of any kind in the Vedic religion.⁷

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¹ ÇB. vii. 2. 4. 14 ; cf. GGS. iii. 2. 58.

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² KÇS. xxv. 4. 4 ff.

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³ ApÇS. v. 14. 2.

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⁴ ÇB. v. 2. 2. 4 ; Weber, *Vājapeya*, p. 36.

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⁵ ÇB. x. 1. 4. 13.

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⁶ GGS. iii. 2. 57.

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⁷ Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², p. 416.

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The silence taboo may be variously explained : possibly it may denote the desire to avoid the attacks of evil spirits who may enter the open mouth : retirement into solitude which is further recommended may denote the same feeling, and the sleeping on the ground is interpreted by Oldenberg as a device for avoiding the attacks of such spirits, who will be misled by the change of couch. So also, he thinks, one of the causes of the abstinence from intercourse is the avoidance of attack by the demons whom such conduct deceives. It is possible, however, that in the case of sleeping on the ground another motive was at work, the desire to obtain the power which belongs to the earth spirit : we are reminded of the priests of Zeus at Dodona who slept on the ground.⁸

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⁸ Kretschmer, *Gesch. d. griech. Spr.*, p. 87.

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The fear of the spirits is of course an undoubted motive in the case of the constant taboo of anything connected with death. The teacher who desires to instruct his pupil in the secret texts which cannot be recited in the village must not see blood, a cemetery, nor certain beasts, which are said to be shaped like a corpse.⁹ The pupil himself is to avoid the sight of a place of burning bodies or the bearers of such bodies ; he should not look into a well, nor climb a tree : ¹⁰ the first of these rules reminds us that the spirits dwell in the depths of the earth, that it is dangerous to see one’s own reflection in the water, and the second may refer to the part played by the tree as giving the coffin or covering for the body or ashes of the dead. Again the Snātaka may not sit directly on the bare earth, which may be thus explained or by the fear of his losing his holiness by contact with earth.¹ He may not go by evening to another village or by any but the main road, probably lest he meet evil spirits.² There are also innumerable other taboos, connected not only with death but with lying-in women, and women in their courses, who are regarded as specially full of danger by many peoples, an idea which is often to be traced to the blood taboo.³ Of special frequence is the occurrence of taboo against the use of vessels of clay : the consecrated man must not use such a vessel for his milk food, the butter used at the Tānūnaptra service must not be covered by such a vessel, the learner of the Jyeṣṭha Sāman must not eat or drink from such an utensil, the milk for the new-moon offering must not be covered in this way, and so on.⁴ The vessel used when certain secret texts are recited must be of metal.⁵ In these cases the Brāhmaṇas show clearly that the sense of the connexion of the earth with the dead was the cause of the objection.

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⁹ ÇGS. ii. 12. 10 ; vi. 1. 4, 5.

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¹⁰ ÇGS. iv. 12. 27 ff.

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¹ ÇGS. iv. 12. 21.

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² GGS. iii. 5. 32.

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³ Reinach, *Cultes, Mythes et Religions*, i. 162 ff. ; Frazer, *Taboo*, pp. 145 ff. This work contains examples of all the kinds of Vedic taboos.

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⁴ KÇS. vii. 4. 33 ; viii. 2. 1 ; GGS. iii. 2. 60, 61, &c.

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⁵ GGS. iii. 2. 35 ; PGS. i. 3. 5.

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On the other hand there are instances in which the aim of man is precisely the opposite from that seen in the working of taboos : he desired to come into the closest possible relations with the object which he desires to provide. Thus in the case of the Çakvarī verses which are already alluded to in the Rigveda the rules for the conduct of the pupil who desires to study the verses are of a peculiar nature. He is required to follow certain rules for a period of from twelve years to a year—in fixing lengths of courses the Brahmans are always accommodating—which include the duty of touching water thrice daily, wearing black garments, eating black food, exposing himself uncovered to the rain : he must not cross flowing water nor save in case of the greatest need go on a ship, because the strength of the Çakvarī rests in the waters. At the end, when he has learned to sing the verses, he must plunge his hands in water in which vegetables are placed.⁶ The whole performance has only one possible meaning : it is a Brahmanized version of a rain spell. Moreover, the ordinary student is encouraged to expose himself to the rain :⁷ the holy youth is not to shrink from the holy element. The same sort of observance in the case of the sun is laid down for students of the Sāmaveda :⁸ they are not to cover themselves from the sun with more than a single garment, and not to allow anything save trees to get between them and the sun. The performer of the Pravargya⁹ ceremony is forbidden to cover himself in the sun, or to defile it by performing before it any of the acts of nature :¹⁰ at night he must make a light, and eat by it, thus creating for himself a presentment of the sun. The performer of the second form of consecration at the Soma offering takes nothing save hot milk in the effort to make complete the state of heat which the performer of the first consecration aimed at.¹

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⁶ PB. xii. 13. 14 ; TS. ii. 2. 8. 5 ; GGS. iii. 2.

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⁷ PGS. ii. 7. 11 ; GGS. iii. 5. 11. Cf. Usener, *Archiv f. Religionswissenschaft*, vii. 285.

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⁸ GGS. iii. 1. 31 ff.

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⁹ ÇB. xiv. 1. 1. 33.

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¹⁰ Cf. the rule for the Brahman student, ÇB. xiv. 1. 2. 33 ; AV. xiii. 1. 56 (with Lanman's note); Hes. *op.* 725 ; Brunnhofer, *Arische Urzeit*, pp. 324, 325.

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¹ Weber, *Ind. Stud.* x. 363.

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It is of interest to mention in conclusion the conjecture put forward by Weber² that the word taboo as *tābuva* was actually found in the Atharvaveda;³ it is clear that such a suggestion could not possibly be made good, and the idea has been rejected with almost entire unanimity by scholars.⁴

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² SBA. 1896, pp. 681 ff., 873 ff. (with remarks of Jacobi, E. Kuhn, and Bendall); cf. *Ind. Stud.* xviii. 215; Bloomfield, *Atharvaveda*, p. 61.

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³ v. 13. 10. For other strange terms in this hymn, cf. Tilak, *Bhandarkar Comm. Vol.*, pp. 27 ff. See also App. G.

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⁴ Hillebrandt, *Rituallitteratur*, p. 171. *Contra*, Hauer, *Die Anfänge der Yoga-praxis im alten Indien*, p. 63.

§ 4. The Forms of Prayer

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The Rigveda shows quite clearly that the conception of prayer for aid to a god without the performance of any sacrifice was quite natural and intelligible. The heroes of its narratives of the deeds of the Açvins in special seem to have been specially eager in their prayers for the aid they desired. But the priests were, from the earliest period of the later Saṁhitās and probably earlier, ready to find the exact formulae with which the deity should be addressed in every stage of trouble, and, what was still more important, to lay down the nature of the necessary offering. Hence we find even in the Taittirīya Saṁhitā⁵ an elaborate account of the different offerings to be made to the gods for a vast variety of cases of special desires: the verses used by the priests for the Anuvākyās and Yājyās are taken from the Rigveda, many however in a very far from natural way, showing that the only interest of the composers of these lists of offerings was to find some verse, which by connexion of sound or sense might be thought appropriate. On the other hand the ritual still here and there allows the offering of prayers which were not immediately dictated by the necessity of accompanying libations: thus in the Agniṣṭoma the morning litany, the Prātaranuvāka with its address to Agni, to the Dawn, and to the Açvins is independent of any actual libations. In the domestic⁶ ritual the rule is laid down that the student is to perform the devotion to the twilight, both night and morning in the wood: after the twilight is over, he has to repeat the three sacred words Bhūḥ, Bhuvaḥ, and Svar, and the Sāvitrī verse: the sacred words denote, the first earth, the third heaven, but the intermediate expression has no obvious relation to the intermediate space, save in so far as it may be a compound, as suggested by Oldenberg,⁷ of the two elements of the first and third words. In another form of ritual the prayer is connected not with a libation, but with a ceremonial reverence to the fire, the Upasthāna, where by the mention of his devotion to the fire the votary intends, in the naïve conception of the Brāhmaṇas, to call the attention of the god to the fact of his existence and doubtless also of his needs.¹

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⁵ ii. 1. 1 ff. There is a considerable similarity in many of the magic rites of the Kauçika Sūtra as is pointed out by Caland (*Altindisches Zauberritual*, p. viii).

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⁶ ÇGS. ii. 9.

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⁷ *Rel. des Veda*², p. 431, n. 4.

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¹ ÇB. ii. 3. 4. 7.

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In the main the rule is observed that the prayers, which celebrate the actions of the gods and invoke their aid, are in verse, while the prose is restricted to the formulae, which accompany each act of the sacrifice and in special each offering as it is made. But there are here and there prose prayers spoken by the Adhvaryu, as at the new- and full-moon offering and at the horse sacrifice. But, whatever the type of the prayer, the result is the same: the priest prays that the sacrificer—who may of course be himself—shall have long life, riches, especially in cattle and horses, in chariots and gold, sons in abundance, freedom from disease, success over his enemy, and prosperity in general; he also prays that his enemies may be brought to ruin.² It is undeniable that the prayers are nearly always for material objects, and that the occasional expressions of desire for spiritual goods are in the extreme exceptional: here and there we find admissions of sin and desire to be at friendship with the gods, especially Varuṇa, but that there is much ethical content in the hymns generally it would be absurd to assert. The real object of the hymn is to please the god by the references to his past deeds and his power, and thus induce him to manifest again the strength of his right arm for the benefit of his servants. The hymns often remind the god of their ancestral connexion, and in the pride of their production and of the value which the gods must attach to them are extremely naïve. It is wholly impossible to doubt that, if the Adhvaryu really thought that the acts of the sacrifice and the actual offerings were what mattered, his view was not in the least shared by the Hotṛ, who was of opinion that his perfectly constructed hymns would give the god the greatest possible amount of pleasure. It is a question of interest, but one which cannot be answered, how it came about that this love of poetry died out, after it must have flourished for some centuries. The Brāhmaṇa period is clearly a time when the priests are content in the main to use the traditional poetry, and, if they composed, to base their compositions very closely on the traditional models. The pride of the Vedic poets in their own powers is perfectly evidenced, when they claim that their hymns strengthen Indra for the slaying of Vṛtra or that through the prayers the steeds are yoked to the chariot of the god. Here as everywhere the tendency of the sacrifice to pass into magic is illustrated: the prayer which is really essentially free from magic is at last turned by the pride of its composers into nothing but a spell.

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² The theory that the spell precedes prayer, which is widely held (Meyer, *Gesch. d. Alt.*³ I. ii. pp. 870, 871; Usener, *Archiv f. Religionswissenschaft*, vii. 15 ff.; Feist, *Kultur der Indogermanen*, pp. 349 ff.; cf. Farnell, *Evolution of Religion*, pp. 163 ff.), stands or falls with the view that magic precedes religion. On the view here taken that they are independent, prayer is not originally a spell; cf. Bloomfield, *Religion of the Veda*, pp. 205 ff.; Jevons, *Idea of God*, pp. 108 ff.; Heiler, *Das Gebet* (1921).

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The Brāhmaṇas and the ritual¹ give advice to the priest how to make use of the service for ends not openly expressed. If the ritual contain in a liturgy the word 'possessing heroic sons', he has but to think of the wife of the sacrificer, and he will bring it about that she has a strong son: the word 'embryo' if thought on will bring her fertility. But, on the other hand, the power can be used for evil as effectively: if the priest but think of the enemy whom he hates, when he takes up the pressing stone in his hand, he can overthrow the enemy: the pressing stone thus becomes a weapon to slay him.² Of these puerilities the Brāhmaṇas are never tired,³ and this attitude of mind must be accepted as a fundamental fact of their mental outlook.

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¹ ÇB. iii. 9. 4. 17; ÇÇS. iv. 8. 4. 3; v. 9. 19; 14. 12, &c. The highest pitch of absurdity is perhaps reached in the narrative how by the error in placing an accent a foe of Indra ruined himself and not Indra; Keith, *Taittirīya Saṁhitā*, i. p. 185; TS. ii. 5. 2. 1; ÇB. i. 6. 3. 10.

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² ÇB. iii. 9. 4. 17; cf. PB. ii. 13. 2; vi. 5. 18; 6. 2; MS. i. 4. 12; 6. 3; ii. 5. 8; iii. 1. 9, &c.; AB. iii. 3. 2 ff.; 6. 1 ff.

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³ TS. vi. 4. 4. 3 (device to secure women’s love); MS. iv. 5. 7; ÇB. i. 4. 3. 11 ff.

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