The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.s2: B. The Sacrifice of Puruṣa and the Origin of the World

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.s2

Language: English

B. The Sacrifice of Puruṣa and the Origin of the World

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H. Güntert¹ has traced the common possession over an area extending from Germany, through the Thraco-Phrygian area, to the Indo-Iranians of a number of mythological elements, which are preserved for us in complex and contaminated forms in the religious records of these peoples. The first of these ideas is that of the origin of mankind and the world from the sacrifice of a primeval being, an idea suggested by the great potency which primitive religious thought ascribes to the bloody sacrifice.² This is preserved for us in the legend of the sacrifice of Puruṣa and of Ymir, whose original character he strongly defends against suggestion of Christian influence; it is reflected also in the strange, though late, legend of Odin who records how for nine nights he hung on a tree, wounded by the spear, dedicated to Odin, himself to himself. The action of the god in permitting himself to be sacrificed is one of free will, motived by the desire to create the world and establish the race of men. Yama, he holds, is such a god; the difficult passage of the Rigveda, x. 13. 4, he explains as a reference to a deliberate decision by Yama to sacrifice himself for the sake of mankind; it is as a sacrificer of himself that Yama performs the feat of finding the hidden Agni,³ who is the mediator in the sacrifice between the offerer and the gods. Later we find in Iran the conception of some sin in the primitive being, as in Yima, and, when the human sacrifice became antiquated, the creator as in the legend of Mithra slays a bull, not a human being.⁴

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¹ *Der arische Weltkönig*, pp. 315 ff.

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² Bousset, *Hauptprobleme d. Gnosis*, p. 211.

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³ RV. x. 51. 3. All metres rest on Yama, x. 14. 16.

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⁴ Cf. perhaps the bull sacrificed by the gods in AV. ix. 4.

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The second motif is the belief that men are sprung from a primeval creature of bi-sexual character. This idea can be traced in Teutonic mythology in legends of Tuisto, Ymir, Tveggi, in the Doias of Phrygia, in Prajāpati and Puruṣa¹ in India, and in Zrvān in Iran, while the Yama legend shows the variant by which a twin sister is given to the primeval man, in order to explain the origin of man, a conception found also in Iran in the legends of Yimak, Manušak, and Mašyānīk.

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¹ *RV.* x. 90. 5; Virāj, a feminine principle born from Puruṣa, and he from her. So with Aditi and Dakṣa. Cf. also Ziegler, *Neue Jahrb.* xxxi (1913), 529 ff. on Plato's *Symposion* and Empedokles.

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The third motif is the view that the first to die becomes, like Yama and Yima, the lord of the blessed dead, and, like Yama, the judge of the dead. Further, he may be regarded as the ancestor of men, and in virtue of his paternal power a great king when on earth, and one whence royal families are fain to claim descent, ideas found in the legends of Yima, Jamšed, Yama, and the Teutonic Mannus. The first mortal is also deemed the first sacrificer, like Manu and Yama, from whom as in the case of Manuš in Iran priests claim their origin.

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Güntert, while admitting the possibility of Asianic origin for the myth of an androgynous primeval creator of mankind, does not claim that the motifs discussed are Indo-European, but rather takes them as evidence of a long-continued contact between the special peoples among whom they occur. A similar contact he finds² suggested by the partial parallelisms of Odin-Wodan with Varuṇa and Ahura Mazdāh, the root idea in all these cases being, in this view, that of a lord and creator of the world, a cosmic magician, one of whose aspects is that of him who binds the sinner, whence the name Varuṇa from *ver*, bind, while Mitra, whose name has a similar force,³ binds men together in bonds of social obligation. A connecting link between the Aryans and the Teutons may be seen in the Thracian deity Darzales, whose name denotes him as the binder, and who may be the source of the Egyptian Sarapis,⁴ while the Thracians and the Phrygians had a goddess Bendis with similar functions. Savitṛ again is merely a hypostasis of Varuṇa,⁵ the aspect in which the world lord stretches aloft his mighty hands, the beams of the sun, and his figure accords with the delineations of a god with mighty hands uplifted which are found freely in the German and Thraco-Phrygian areas, while a remnant of the idea is to be seen in the epithet ‘long-handed’ applied to the Iranian demon Būšyasta.

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² *Op. cit.*, pp. 150 ff.

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³ *Op. cit.*, pp. 147 f. For Mitra cf. *μίτρη*.

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⁴ Weinreich, *Neue Urkunden zur Sarapis-Religion* (1919), p. 7.

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⁵ Güntert, p. 161. The further effort (p. 168) to find a Swedish rock delineation of the parallel of Varuṇa with his noose (15 cent. B.C.) is as speculative as that in respect of the Dioskouroi (pp. 272 f.).

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The ingenuity of these suggestions deserves recognition, but it must be regarded as very dubious whether they really serve to establish the closer religious connexions between certain of the Indo-European peoples which are postulated. The case of Savitṛ is clearly unconvincing; the parallel is too general to be of value; the idea of representing the sun as of human form with uplifted hands is one which might easily occur independently; there is nothing specially distinctive in the resemblance of Odin and Varuṇa as magicians, and the evidence for the origin of the world from a primitive sacrifice is too slight to enable us to feel any assurance of a common origin. It must be added that the evidence for Yama as originally the primeval being from whose sacrifice the world springs is inconclusive, for the Rigvedic passage cited naturally denotes a sacrifice of Bṛhaspati, not of Yama, and says no more than that Yama died. The finding of Agni by Yama does not absolutely prove his divinity, and in any case has no necessary connexion with his sacrificing himself. Moreover the contention that the idea of the origin of the world in sacrifice must be old because it rests on the belief in the peculiar efficacy of human sacrifice, and that form of sacrifice is essentially primitive, is wholly speculative, and by no means probable. At least as good a case can be made out for the belief that the high value attached to the human offering is a product of religious development. This is so whether we take¹ the cause of human offerings to be the desire to propitiate a god who naturally menaces human life, such as a god of death, of war, or of the sea, or whether the sacrifice is one of a man to represent the god;² in the latter case the offering of a man is associated with anthropomorphic conceptions of deity, and, while we need not believe that animal conceptions are older, we certainly cannot think anthropomorphic the oldest.³ Substitution legends are aetiological and mark a refined speculation, not primitive ideas.

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¹ E. Mogk (*Die Menschenopfer der Germanen*, Leipzig, 1909) thus explains the origin of German human sacrifices. See also F. Schwenn, *Die Menschenopfer bei den Griechen und Römern*; Reid, *JHS.* ii. 34 ff.

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² Cf. Preuss, *Globus*, lxxxvi. 108 ff.; Frazer, *The Dying God*; Farnell, *Cults of the Greek States*, v. 167 ff.; W. Weber, *Archiv f. Religionswissenschaft*, xix. 333 ff.; Wissowa, xxii. 201 ff. (expulsion of evil).

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³ Cf. Helm, *Altgerm. Rel.* i. 51.

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Güntert⁴ contends that in the case of Yama a distinction must be made between the ideas of ‘dead’, ‘human’, and ‘immortal’; Yama was a god who permitted himself to be sacrificed, and therefore died, but he is not a man (*mānuṣa*, *mānava*). Thus the Atharvaveda⁵ describes him as the first of mortals (*mártya*) to die, but not as a man, while the Rigveda⁶ refers to his innate immortality (*Yamásya jātám amṛ́tam*). But despite his relation to Vivasvant it is impossible to deny his mortality by these distinctions; what-ever his origin, to the Vedic poet he was the first of men to die.

Linked texts (2)

Ṛgvedasaṃhitā — Sanskrit
Atharvavedasaṃhitā — Atharvan & Aṅgiras, Sanskrit