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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c28.s1: § 1. The Consecration

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c28.s1

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§ 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.

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