The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.s2.14

v2.c41.s2.14

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.