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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c30.s16: § 16. The Human Sacrifice

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c30.s16

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§ 16. The Human Sacrifice

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The human sacrifice as prescribed in two of the ritual texts² is based closely on the horse sacrifice; while there the chief victims are the horse, a Gomṛga, and a hornless goat, here a man is added, a Brahman or Kṣatriya bought at the price of a thousand cows and a hundred cattle, and he is permitted like the horse a year of freedom, in which he can do as he wishes, save that he must remain chaste. The offering is to be performed by a Brahman or a Kṣatriya who is not successful. When slain, the chief queen must lie beside the victim as beside the horse: the attempt to find a reference to this practice in the Rigveda³ is a failure. On the other hand the nominal offering of large numbers of other men, 166 at 11 posts, is mentioned by the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa,⁴ but we have every reason to assume that this is mere priestly imagination, unless, as is possible, the conceptions of the priest were occasionally made real by a king. It is laid down⁵ that a king may on this occasion give up his goods and enter into the life of the wandering mendicant, but this seems merely to have been a facultative rule. It must, however, be noted that the rite of an actual slaying of man is not described in the Brāhmaṇas at all: there is in the Çatapatha and the Taittirīya and their Sūtras merely the symbolic offering of men, who are let free like the wild animals at the horse sacrifice, and therefore the actual offering rests merely on Sūtra evidence, the Vaitāna and Çāṅkhāyana, and not even on the early Sūtras. It is not credible that the Brāhmaṇas should have passed over the rite if they had actually known of it; its mention in the later Sūtras is consistent only with the invention of it, as a reasonable complement to the theory of sacrifice which saw an anomaly in the omission of man from the victims.⁶

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² ÇÇS. xvi. 10 f.; Vait. xxxvii. 10 ff.; Weber, ZDMG. xviii. 262 ff.; *Episches im vedischen Ritual*, pp. 9 ff.; *Rājasūya*, pp. 47, 52; Hillebrandt, *Ritual-litteratur*, p. 153; Keith, *Taittirīya Saṁhitā*, i. pp. cxxxv, cxxxvii, cxl.

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³ x. 18. 8; 85. 21, 22; Hillebrandt, ZDMG. xl. 708–11; *Ved. Myth.* ii. 109. See Oldenberg, GGA. 1907, p. 218, n. 1.

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⁴ ÇB. xiii. 6; KÇS. xxi. 1; TB. iii. 4. 1–19; ĀpÇS. xx; HÇS. xiv. 6.

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⁵ ÇB. xiii. 6. 2. 20; KÇS. xxi. 1. 17.

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⁶ Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², p. 363; Keith, *Taittirīya Saṁhitā*, i. pp. cxxxvii-cxl; Eggeling, SBE. xliv. pp. xl ff. Hopkins (*Rel. of India*, pp. 198–200), however, accepts it.

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No other trace of human sacrifice exists in the Vedic literature apart from the quite different case of the use of a man and four other victims as an offering at the piling of the great fire altar.¹ This usage is not actually laid down for the contemporary time by any Brāhmaṇa: the most contemplated is the use of the head of a man who has been slain by lightning or by an arrow shot, not a victim killed for the purpose, and normally the head of a goat seems to have sufficed. But it is clearly no real sacrifice at all. The legend of Çunaḥçepa, which has been thought to embody an old legend of human sacrifice which was later abolished, and for which the recitation of the story suffices when recited to the king at the royal consecration, has been noted above; its essential feature of the horror of the proposed offering, whether the victim is the son of the king or merely a priest, and the view thus taken is quite incompatible with the idea that the actual human sacrifice was performed in Vedic India.²

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¹ Hubert and Mauss, *Année sociol.* ii. 104.

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² Punishment of crime occasionally takes the form of a sacrifice (ApDS. i. 9. 25. 12; VasDS. xx. 25 f.), but this is isolated and abnormal; Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², p. 363, n. 1.

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