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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c32.s6: § 6. Divination and Ordeal

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c32.s6

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§ 6. Divination and Ordeal

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The principle of divination is in large measure directly due to the doctrine of mimetic magic:⁷ if the use of a representation of things can produce them, it is also legitimate, if less easy, to deduce the future of events from the behaviour of things, which are supposed to be an imitation of the events. This, however, is no doubt not the whole ground of the belief in the power to read the future, and, moreover, the fact that the future was uncertain must have induced many people to resort to the gods for aid in unravelling it. In these cases the performances are indeed much the same as in an ordinary species of divination, but the belief is different: it is the view that the future is revealed by the god, through the means employed: magic here is supplemented as often by religious conceptions.

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⁷ Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², pp. 484, 507 ff.; Henry, *op. cit.*, pp. 59-62. Divination from the entrails of the victim, which is specially Babylonian (Farnell, *Greece and Babylon*, pp. 248, 249), is not Vedic. For Babylon, cf. Meyer, *Gesch. d. Alt.*³ I. ii. pp. 585-7; for Greece, W. R. Halliday, *Greek Divination* (1913).

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The use of means is very varied: the fire of the sacrifice and the victim at the sacrifice are specially suited to give knowledge by their magic connexion with the gods as well as religious conceptions: more clearly connected with the activity of divine powers in Vedic belief is the drawing of omens from the flight and the movements of animals, which are specially clearly connected with birds or beasts, with gods or spirits of the dead or demons. When a ceremony is performed to win for a maiden a husband, the side from which crows first appear is that from which her wooer will come.¹ The movement of the cow at a particular moment in the Soma sacrifice shows the fortune of the sacrificer.² The clear flaming of the fire at a sacrifice brings with it the prospect of twelve villages for the sacrificer; if it smokes, of at least three.³ More interesting is the rule that, when the body of the dead is being burned, the soul will go to the heaven, atmosphere, or the earth according as the eastern, western, or southern fire first reaches it.⁴ The owl is invoked to fly round the village and give signs for the future: it is a bird which flies to the dwellings of the gods, and the Rigveda already knows birds of omen.⁵ The hyena's howl is uttered either of its own will, or on the prompting of other powers.⁶ The battle's result can be judged by the lighting of a special fire on a suitable place and observing the movements of the fire, or it can be forecasted by taking three bowstrings, and placing them on a fire: the movements of the three, of which the middle one is treated as death, will show the event: that which keeps clear from it will represent the victorious army, that which comes into contact with it the army which is to be ruined.⁷ The character of the bride can be judged by the choice by her of balls of earth chosen from very various places:⁸ the sex of the future child by the fact whether the member of the body of the prospective mother which a Brahman boy touches has a masculine or feminine name.⁹

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¹ Kauç. xxxiv. 24.

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² ÇB. iv. 5. 8. 11.

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³ GGS. iv. 8. 15.

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⁴ AGS. iv. 4. 2 ff.

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⁵ HGS. i. 17. 3; RV. ii. 42 and 43.

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⁶ HGS. i. 17. 1.

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⁷ Kauç. xiv. 31; xv. 15.

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⁸ GGS. ii. 1. 3 ff.

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⁹ Kauç. xxxiii. 19. For other modes see Henry, *op. cit.*, p. 67.

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The meanings of dreams is an interesting part of Vedic magic and is dealt with in various passages, including an Atharvan Pariçiṣṭa. The Rigveda ¹⁰ already regards as ominous the making of a garland or neckband in a dream. Ten dreams which forebode death are recorded in the Aitareya Āraṇyaka:¹¹ when one sees in a dream a black man with black teeth who kills him, when a boar kills him, when a wild cat springs on him, when one eats and then spits out gold, when one eats honey and lotus roots, when one goes to a village with asses or boars, or when one drives south a black cow with a black calf, wearing a garland of nard. If one has a dream, one should, as we have seen, wash one’s mouth. The view is also held that certain stars are unlucky, especially Mūla.¹ Moreover, many sights forebode evil: the sun seeming as the moon, the heaven red like madder, when one’s shadow appears upside down in a mirror or water, or when one’s head smells like a crow’s nest.² Evil is further portended by meteors and lightning. Of ominous birds the main classes are those which are black or whose appearance or utterance is horrible: the pigeon, the owl, the vulture, the Dīrghamukhī, &c., but the bird is also called generally the mouth of Dissolution. Birds,³ too, are said to go about in the semblance of the Fathers, other animals are seldom mentioned in this regard; the fact that a horse on several occasions is used to forecast prosperity, or other results, is rather due to its connexion with the offering than to its intrinsic nature as ominous, though fortune in popular superstition can be inferred from the neighing of a horse.⁴ Other prodigies are the appearance of an ant-heap in the house, the making of honey there by the bees, the scream of a jackal, the drinking of one cow from another, the cows giving blood for milk, and so on.⁵

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¹⁰ viii. 47. 15; Oldenberg's note to x. 164.

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¹¹ iii. 2. 4. For an evil dream one should turn over on the other side, saying AV. vii. 100, and for expiating the dream of eating in sleep should say AV. vii. 101 (cf. Caland, *Altindisches Zauberritual*, p. 151; Pischel, *Album-Kern*, pp. 115 ff.); Kauç. xlvi. See also J. von Negelein, *Der Traumschlüssel des Jagaddeva* (1912), p. 378.

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¹ Kauç. xlvi. 25 ff. Cf. Bloomfield, *Atharvaveda*, pp. 83, 85.

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² AA. iii. 2. 4; cf. LÇS. iii. 3. 6 ff.; ApÇS. ix. 20. 10. The sight of the dead presages death to the seer; JUB. iii. 29.

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³ AB. ii. 15. 4; BDS. ii. 8. 14. 9, 10.

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⁴ Grimm, *Deutsche Myth.*⁴ iii. 442.

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⁵ ÇGS. v. 11. 10; HGS. i. 16. 19; 17. 6; Kauç. cxii.

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The existence of men skilled in the interpretation of omens is natural and is also recorded, as for instance in the case of the men who could tell the marks which led to luck or otherwise in the choice of a wife. We hear also of a prophet who made his prophecies on the basis of the smoke of dung, the Çakadhūma of the Atharvaveda, whose business it was, it is clear, to forecast the weather.⁶ We learn also of men who by the means of plants such as the Sadampuṣpā⁷ were able to behold sorcerers male and female, whether they went in the sky or on the earth: the same idea of the power of socerers to assume various forms is found in the Rigveda⁸ where it asks for the destruction of the demons, who in form of birds fly about the village at night. Necromancy, however, is not apparently known,⁹ nor the inspection, on a system, of the entrails of the victims, in order to read the future.

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⁶ Bloomfield, *Atharvaveda*, p. 81; Henry, *op. cit.*, pp. 68 ff.

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⁷ Kauç. xxviii. 7; AV. iv. 20.

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⁸ vii. 104. 18.

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⁹ Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², p. 569, n. 2.

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The ordeal is nothing more than a form of divination in one of its aspects: the idea in it is not that the deity would actually punish an accused person so much as that it should by its treatment of him show whether or not he is innocent of the charge made against him. But the analogy of the ordeal to the oath in which the swearer invokes a penalty on himself, if he is telling untruth, shows that the separation of the ideas of punishment and discrimination cannot be assumed to have been present to the Vedic mind:¹⁰ the form of ordeals recorded for early Vedic times shows the prevalence of punishment at the same time as the test of fact: the Rigveda has not any certain example of the ordeal: the only Brāhmaṇa cases are those in which Vatsa asserts his purity of Brahmanical origin by walking through the fire without harm affecting him,¹ Triçoka's assertion of superior Vedic knowledge by a fire ordeal and the successful crossing of a stream, and the glowing axe which is brought up for the purpose of testing the accused thief.² The fire as a sentient power by failing to burn or by burning shows innocence or guilt: but it punishes at the same time, and this is roughly speaking true of some of even the later ordeals, such as the poison and water ordeals.³ A procedure to prevent the burning of the hand in the ordeal of plunging the hand into boiling oil to extract a piece of gold is prescribed in the Kauçika.⁴

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¹⁰ *Ibid.*, p. 508; Jolly, ZDMG. xliv. 346; Macdonell and Keith, *Vedic Index*, i. 364, 365, 392; Glotz, *L’ordalie* (1904);

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¹ PB. xiv. 6. 8; JB. iii. 233 ff. Keith, *ERE. s. v.* Ordeal; Hopkins, *Origin of Religion*, p. 256.

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² CU. vi. 16. Cf. the use of fires to discriminate after death, ÇB. i. 9. 3. 2; below, Chap. 28, § 10.

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³ As weighing ordeal, without punishment directly, is hinted at in ÇB. xi. 2. 7. 33, where a man's fate after death is determined by weighing his good and evil deeds.

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⁴ lii. 8, 9; Henry, *La magie dans l'Inde antique*, p. 100.

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