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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c36.s3: § 3. The Offerings to the Dead in the Çrauta Ritual

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c36.s3

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§ 3. The Offerings to the Dead in the Çrauta Ritual

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In the Çrauta ritual a leading place in the cult of the dead is taken by the Piṇḍapitṛyajña,⁴ which should be offered after midday of the day of new moon. The sacrifice must take place in the southern fire, which is that appropriate to the Fathers, and the regular procedure of such offerings is followed: the sacred cord is to be worn over the right shoulder, not the left; all movements are from right to left, and recitations and acts take place once, not thrice; while in the normal offering movements are from south and west to north and east, in this offering they are in the reverse order, in so far that they must begin in the north and end in the south. In the libations the hand has the outer part turned downwards, the space between the thumb and the index finger is the space which serves for the passage of the oblations. Water is touched after each naming of the Fathers, and the offerer looks south, not north.¹ A pit is dug in the earth, south or west of the southern fire, with a formula to drive away the Asuras and the Rakṣases, and a firebrand from that fire is used as an additional mode of causing fear. The offering begins with two libations of boiled grain or butter to Soma with the Fathers and to Agni Kavyavāhana. Then the Fathers are directly approached : at the beginning, middle, and end of the furrow or pit water is poured, and the Fathers are invited to wash themselves.² Then Darbha grass is strewn in the pit, and from the remains of the rice pap and butter are made three lumps of food, or according to some authorities four, which are laid down in the pit on the places on which the water was formerly poured. In each case the Fathers are hailed by name if they are known as the father, grandfather, and greatgrandfather of the offerer; if the father of the offerer is still alive, various varieties of procedure are mentioned.³ The Fathers are invited to delight themselves : the offerer turns his back—doubtless to avoid too close contact, not that they may be unencumbered by his presence,⁴ and remains with averted head, until he is breathless or the food is cold : he then turns round to the lumps, says, ‘The Fathers have delighted themselves’, and pours water on the lumps, adds salve and some pieces of wool—or if over fifty, hair from his arm or breast—and invites the Fathers to wash, anoint, and clothe ⁵ themselves. He may also smell, if he desires a son, the remains of the pot. The Fathers are then honoured, and the Adhvaryu, looking south-east, and pushing away the lumps, bids them depart, pays reverence to the southern and the Gārhapatya fires, for the removal of all sin against heaven and earth. If the wife of the offerer wishes a son, then she eats the middle lump as in the domestic ritual : the other two may be thrown into fire or water, or eaten by prescribed persons.

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⁴ ApÇS. i. 7–10; KÇS. iv. 1; AÇS. ii. 6, 7; ÇÇS. iv. 3–5; Donner, *Piṇḍapitṛyajña* (Berlin, 1870); Caland, *Todtenverehrung*, pp. 3 ff.; *Todtengebräuche*, pp. 172, 173.

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¹ Other distinctions in offerings to the dead are the use of sesame in place of barley, of folded grass instead of straight stalks for the strew, of black not red victims, the use of old worn-out things, and the turning south with hairy side downwards, not east with hair upwards, of skins, doubtless to attract the spirits to take up their place therein.

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² Cf. Kleidamos in Athenaios, ix. p. 410.

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³ Weber, *Ind. Stud.* x. 82, n. 1.

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⁴ This is the Indian view; Caland, *Altind. Ahnenkult*, p. 180.

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⁵ Possibly the idea of the Fathers clothed only in their hair (Petavatthu, i. 10. 2) may here be present ; Oldenberg (*Rel. des Veda*², p. 552) insists on taking all offerings of hair as redemptions of self. But it is enough to recognize that a hair offering brings the living into close communion with the dead as is shown in many of the usages. Cf. Wilken, *Rev. Col. Int.* iii. 225 ff. ; iv. 345 ff. ; Frazer, *Magic Art*, i. 28 ff. ; Gruppe, *Griech. Myth.*, p. 913 ; Cook, *Zeus*, i. 23, 24 ; Samter, *Geburt, Hochzeit und Tod*, pp. 179 ff. ; *ERE.* iv. 431 ff. Cf. above, p. 428, n. 5. Disguise is an inadequate motive.

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The second great Çrauta offering is that of the Pitṛyajña, or Mahāpitṛyajña, which takes place on the afternoon of the second day of the Sākamedhas, the third of the four-month offerings.¹ The recipients of offerings are the Fathers with Soma, or Soma with the Fathers, the Fathers who sit on the strew, and the Fathers burned by Agni, while some add Yama with or without the Aṅgirases. The offerings to the three sets of Fathers are a cake, grains, and the offering of meal pap mixed in the milk of the cow, which has lost its own calf, and which has been given another to bring up. The sacrifice is conducted within a hut erected south of the southern fire, in which is made an altar with its orientation based on the intermediate points, on which the southern fire is placed. The technical terms of the offering for the Fathers *oṁ svadhā*, *astu svadhā*, *svadhā namaḥ*, replace those used for the gods. An offering for Kavyavāhana is substituted for the usual Sviṣṭakṛt offering at the end of a sacrifice. Washing water is poured out for the Fathers, and lumps are placed at the south-east and west corners of the altar, but the names, not of the latest but of the more distant Fathers, are uttered, the sixth, fifth, and fourth respectively. On the northern side the offerer wipes his hands and says, ‘Here, O Fathers, do ye delight yourselves’, and then all leave the hut, placing the sacred cord over the left shoulder, and adore the Āhavanīya fire, and then the Gārhapatya. They then return to the hut, altering the position of their cords: the offerer declares that the Fathers have delighted themselves and offers them reverence in the shape of six payings of homage.

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¹ The parallel of the winter All-souls festival of Europe; Caland, *Todtenverehrung*, pp. 78 ff.

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The similarity of the domestic and the Çrauta ritual in the case of the offerings to the dead is most marked, indeed more clearly so than in the case of the offerings to the gods, where the presence of the three fires led the Brahmans to constant elaboration of the rites in which they were interested, until they bore but faint similarity to the rites of the householder. In the case of the offerings to the dead, however, the southern fire is the only fire of consequence: the performances of the sacrificer and the priest in the other fires are purely formal, mainly devices to give them something to do, when the Fathers were presumed in spiritual presence to be eating the offerings from which, it is clear, they were deemed to extract the vital heat.

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The very clear differences between the form of the worship of the gods and the reverence paid to the dead² indicate beyond possibility of doubt that the attitude of the living to the dead differed in a marked degree from their attitude towards the gods, a fact which, so far as it goes, is doubtless evidence against the view that the worship of the gods sprang from the worship of men who had died. It is clear, however, that before the period of the Rigveda the tendance of the dead, the giving of gifts to them to use in the life to come, had developed so as to present the definite view that the dead were possessed of great powers, and were in many respects as important to their descendants from the point of view of conferring boons as the gods themselves. It is a question of great interest, but one which is insoluble by any evidence available, whether we are to assume that in the Indo-European period the conception of the divine dead had been developed: there is no evidence of any value to show that it had: we may safely assume that, as even in palaeolithic times in Europe, the dead were buried with due honour and gifts made to them, but the development of divinity may lie within the period of development of the several nations.¹

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² Stengel (*Opferbräuche*, pp. 127 ff.) shows in Greek religion the distinction of worship of the dead, and that of even the chthonian gods; see also Farnell’s distinction of tendance and worship, *Hibbert Journal*, 1909, p. 417.

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¹ Cf. MacCulloch, *Rel. of Anc. Celts*, pp. 165 ff.; Farnell, *Greece and Babylon*, pp. 208 ff., where stress is laid on the absence of any ancestor worship, so far as yet is known, in Babylonian religion. Hence the cult (assumed as Indo-European by Moulton, *Early Zoroastrianism*, p. 262; Feist, *Kultur der Indogermanen*, pp. 327, 328) cannot safely be postulated. In the Greek area matters are complicated by the existence (as shown in the Hagia Triada sarkophagos) of a pre-Hellenic reverence of ancestors perhaps already as divine. For other evidence of the far from universal character of the belief see Hopkins, *Origin of Religion*, pp. 80–2; Warde Fowler, *Roman Ideas of Deity*, pp. 22 f.; Cumont, *After-Life in Roman Paganism*, pp. 60 ff.

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