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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c32.s7: § 7. The Magic Spell

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c32.s7

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§ 7. The Magic Spell

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The power of the word is very marked in all systems of magic and naturally not least in India. The magic spell is sometimes in prose, in the style of the formulae used by the Adhvaryus at the sacrifice, more often in verse, sometimes newly made for the purpose, sometimes, and indeed very often, chosen without any appropriateness from the vast body of existing sacred literature. Of this latter tendency two examples may be given: the number available is legion. The finest hymn to Varuṇa in the Vedic literature is found in the Atharvaveda where it has been preserved in a charm.⁵ The great hymn of the Rigveda, which celebrates the god Prajāpati in the form of questions, has the second verse used in a spell for preventing the miscarriage of a cow, doubtless for no better reason than that the idiotic system on which names of authors were assigned to every hymn of the collection resulted in postulating an author Hiraṇyagarbha, 'he of the golden womb', really an epithet of the supreme god, and the fact that the deity was Prajāpati.⁶

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⁵ iv. 16. It is not clear if the spell is against an enemy who curses or is cursed: *çapyantam* may (*pace* Caland on Kauç. xlviii. 7) be an irregularity (cf. *badhya*, BD. v. 134; vi. 14). See Weber, *Ind. Stud.* xviii. 66; Henry, *op. cit.*, pp. 235-9.

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⁶ Kauç. xliv. 5; RV. x. 121. 2.

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Of the spell one characteristic is the regularity with which many gods are invoked: it is absurd to suppose that in these enumerations there was normally any sense of the different deities invoked: all that was desired was to strengthen the spell by the utterance of as many names of deities as possible: in some cases the mention of individuals is dropped and merely the numbers are given, 99 or 88 or 77 and so on: the fondness for such numbers is a feature of many forms of magic.¹ Analogous to this feature is the fact that when anything is to be dealt with every conceivable place where it may be is enumerated: a disease is banished, not merely from the place where it is paining the person afflicted, but from all his members. On the other hand, where possible the exact name and origin of the thing dealt with must be given: if one can name father and mother so much the better: the drum² is described as coming from the lord of the forest and strung by the cows. Sometimes names of, to us, inexplicable and perhaps esoteric character are given, such as *hrūḍu* applied in the Atharvaveda³ to fever, in accordance with the well-known rule that in magic a mysterious name is the most potent of all.⁴

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¹ AV. xix. 47. 3 ff.; vi. 25; Kuhn, *KZ.* xiii. 128 ff. For the motive of such invocations see Henry, *op. cit.*, pp. 12, 19.

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² AV. v. 20. 1 ff. Cf. Babylonian parallels in Farnell, *Greece and Babylon*, pp. 296–9.

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³ i. 25. 4. Henry’s guess (*op. cit.*, p. 184) of a Semitic source of this word is as impossible as Halévy’s derivation from Greek.

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⁴ Legge, *Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity*, ii. 33.

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A second characteristic of the spells is the stress laid on the recital of comparisons which have magic effect in producing the results desired. The kidneys are made to settle themselves firmly by comparison with the mountains which abide for ever, or the bird which is at rest in its nest, or the cows which have come back to the stall.⁵ The amulet is made effective by the fact that it was the one bound by the Dākṣāyaṇas on Çatānīka.⁶ The dying round the Brahman, which is prescribed in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa⁷ as the spell *par excellence* of the Purohita against the foes of his master, is accompanied by comparison with the mode in which the constellations appear and set again. The birth of the embryo is encouraged by the comparison with the wind which moves the lotus pond on all sides,⁸ and so on indefinitely. The use of the word ‘grow’ is necessary when the Arundhatī plant is addressed in order to heal a broken bone: ‘below’, ‘away’, are used when a disease is expelled: if one practises witchcraft, one should use the word ‘broken’ when offering a cup: in bringing about harmony the word ‘in unison’ is of value. The importance of the name has already been mentioned: it results in the giving to each child of a secret name. Nor is there missing the rite by which a formula is repeated backwards: if the offering priest is interrupted by the servants of the sacrificer, he should repeat backwards the Daçahotṛ formula, and thus bring the sacrifice to ruin.⁹ The use of harsh words like *phaṭ*, &c., is mentioned possibly even as early as the Rigveda.¹⁰

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⁵ AV. vii. 96. 1.

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⁶ AV. i. 35.

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⁷ viii. 28.

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⁸ RV. v. 78. 7.

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⁹ ĀpÇS. xiv. 15. 1.

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¹⁰ x. 87. 13.

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The word has special force in the form of the curse, which is often recorded in Vedic literature and which as is well known is one of the most common motives in later Indian literature. Fish are killed out of hand by men, because they betrayed to the gods Agni when he fled for shelter to the waters and for that deed Agni cursed them to be slain by men.¹¹ The trees which caused illness to the gods were cursed by the gods to be destroyed by a handle of the woodman’s axe, made from their own bodies.¹ The curse is often mentioned as being invoked to recoil on the curser himself, showing that it was a common form of magic attack. It might also be heightened in effect by a formal offering, in which the rules of the sacrifice are violated and the points of reeds are sacrificed to the accompaniment of formulae declaring that the sacrificer takes from the enemy, who has played him false with his wife, hope and sight, children and cattle, breathing in and breathing out.² The curse³ in the Brāhmaṇas is constantly expressed in a curious form: if a man performs an act in the offering incorrectly, then he places himself in such a position that, if any one were to say of or to him something unpleasant, that would come true. The point is clear: the mistake exposes the man guilty of it to the risk of the effective working of any curse which is invoked upon him.

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¹¹ TS. ii. 6. 6. 1.

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¹ PB. vi. 5. 11.

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² ÇB. xiv. 9. 4. 11.

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³ ÇB. xii. 4. 1. 4.

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The Vedic oath is often recorded: the king at the great consecration recorded by the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa must swear to his priest to be true, at the cost otherwise of all his merit in sacrifice and gifts to the priests since the beginning of his life, his good deeds, his offspring, passing from him on the occasion of his falsehood.⁴ But a still older form of oath recorded⁵ is by cows, or waters, or Varuṇa,⁶ and the Indian to this day swears in some cases by Ganges water which he holds in his hand. The legal literature⁷ allows oaths for a Brahman by his truth, for a Kṣatriya by his teams and weapons, and for a Vaiçya by his cows, grain and gold, but these are not recorded for the Vedic period, and the first is modern in appearance as compared with the Vedic oaths. Later, too, we find that the touching of oneself in the oath was not rare, as showing the spirits the person to be punished if the oath were not kept: this usage is proved for late Vedic times by the provision that the touch in such a case is, like the offering to Rudra, a ground for purification by means of water.⁸ Possibly, too, the curses recorded that a man’s head shall fly off, which is paralleled by the Buddhist malediction that the head should split in seven pieces, may be connected with this idea of touching the head.⁹ A joint curse is that of the Tānūnaptra rite, which is an oath of fidelity of the priest and the sacrificer in the Soma sacrifice, with a curse on the violator of the oath. There is in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa¹⁰ an echo of the famous story of the lotus theft, in which the various persons accused of stealing the lotus fibres declared themselves guiltless by the device of invoking the most dreadful misfortunes on the head of the thief, while the true thief, the god himself, revealed his nature by invoking nothing but good. The classical instance of a broken oath is that of Soma, who is punished for failing to keep his promise to dwell with the twenty-seven wives whom he received from Prajāpati, by the disease Rājayakṣma, perhaps consumption.¹

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⁴ AB. viii. 15; cf. Kauç. xvii.

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⁵ TS. i. 3. 11. 1; cf. AV. xix. 44. 9; ÇB. iii. 8. 5. 10. For an oath by water, see Rāmāyaṇa, vii. 65. 29 ff.

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⁶ This form is clearly religious and there is no ground to claim magic as a more primitive source of the oath, both kinds being natural. Cf. von Schroeder, *Arische Religion*, i. 147 ff., 156 ff., 476 ff.

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⁷ Manu, viii. 113. Cf. TS. ii. 3. 5. 1 and the Pāli Saccakiriya (Burlingame, JRAS. 1917, pp. 429 ff.).

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⁸ ÇGS. i. 9. 10.

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⁹ Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², p. 520.

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¹⁰ v. 30; Charpentier, ZDMG. lxiv. 65 ff.; lxvi. 44 ff.; Geldner, lxv. 306, 307.

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¹ TS. ii. 3. 5. 1 ff. Two theories of the effect of a meal combined with an oath may be noted. Oldenberg (*Rel. des Veda*¹, p. 502, n. 4) thinks that the common meal results in creating identity of substance of the partakers, so that he who wrongs another thus wrongs himself. Westermarck (*Anthropological Essays presented to E. B. Tylor*, p. 374) holds that the meal operates a transference of conditional curses to those concerned (and to the god if he is party to the convenant).

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