The Hindus (27 page)

On the other hand, one Brahmana passage forbids the eating of either cow or bull (
dhenu
or
anaduha
),
^cg
concluding that anyone who did eat them would be reborn as something so strange that people would say, “He committed a sin, he expelled the embryo from his wife.” The text then adds, “However, Yajnavalkya said, ‘I
do
eat [the meat of both cow and bull], as long as it’s tasty.’ ”
⁵³
Yajnavalkya was an in-your-face kind of guy. Some people, however, did
not
eat the meat of cows, as Thapar points out: “This may have contributed to the later attitude of regarding the cow as sacred and inviolable, although association with the sacred need not be explained on rational grounds. . . . Eventually it became a matter of status to refrain from eating beef and the prohibition was strengthened by various religious sanctions. Significantly, the prohibition was prevalent only among the upper castes.”
⁵⁴
The ambivalence that is embedded in this historical development is not really so hard for us to understand if we cast its light upon our own casual combination of affection for our pets and appetite for filet mignon. We can see here the Indian insight into the conflicted belief that there is a chain of food and eaters (dog eat dog or, in the Indian metaphor, fish eat fish) that both justifies itself and demands that we break out of it: It happens, but it must not happen.
⁵⁵

The transformation in attitudes toward eating meat developed at this time in part through the sorts of philosophical considerations evident in the narratives and in part through changes in methods of livestock breeding, grazing grounds, and ecology as a result of the basic transition into the urban life of the Ganges Valley, as well as by the social tensions exacerbated by these changes. The breeding of animals in an urban setting may have introduced both less humane grazing conditions and a heightened awareness of those conditions (though some urban dwellers may have been, like many contemporary city dwellers, insulated from farming conditions). The new uneasiness about killing animals may also have been a reaction to the increasing number of animals sacrificed in more and more elaborate ceremonies. Sacrifice was still violent, and sacrifice was still power, but a murmur of protest and discontent was growing steadily stronger, soon to find its voice, faintly in the Upanishads and loudly in the
Mahabharata
.

The texts of this period regard humans as the pawns of the gods. The Vedas and Brahmanas often list (in addition to human beings, a rule that we consider below) five basic kinds of sacrificial animals, or
pashus
, all male: bull, stallion, billy goat, ram, and ass (or donkey), often divided into three groups, bovines, equines (horse and ass), and extended ovines (sheep and goat). The Rig Vedic “Poem of the Primeval Man” (10.90) tells us: “From that sacrifice in which everything was offered, the melted fat was collected and made into those beasts who live in the air, in the forest, and in villages. Horses were born from it, and those other animals that have two rows of teeth [such as asses]; cows were born from it, and from it goats and sheep were born.” These last are the five
pashus
.
Pashus
are generally distinguished from wild animals, who are called
mrigas
, a word derived from the verb “to hunt” (
margayati
, also connected with the noun
marga
[“a trail or path”]), designating any animal that we hunt, particularly a deer. The ancient Indians thus defined animals according to the manner in which they killed them, either in a hunt (
mrigas
) or in a sacrifice (
pashus
). Hunting is one of the vices of addiction, but sacrifice too often becomes excessive, a threat to the gods, who take measures to limit and control it (a feature of the second alliance).

Sometimes a male human being replaces the ass in the list of
pashus
.
⁵⁶
Were human sacrifices actually performed in ancient India?
⁵⁷
Perhaps, but certainly no longer at the time of the Vedas, and even for the pre-Vedic period, the scattered evidence sometimes cited to argue for its actual occurrence is not persuasive. Yet the Vedas refer to human sacrifices, and the texts tell you how to do one.
⁵⁸
Whenever the priests consecrated a Vedic ritual fire altar (
agnicayana
) made of bricks, they placed within it five golden images of the five
pashus
, including a golden man. And archaeological evidence of human skulls and other human bones at the site of such fire altars, together with the bones of a wide variety of other animals, both wild and tame (horses, tortoises, pigs, elephants, bovines, goats, and buffalo), suggests that humans may once actually have been sacrificed in these rituals. The golden man, then, would have replaced a man of flesh and blood.
⁵⁹
It is also possible that the Vedic horse sacrifice originally involved the sacrifice of a man as well as a horse.
⁶⁰
But the human sacrifices are never described in anything like the detail of the horse sacrifice, and it is likely that the human victims, like many of the animal victims, were set free after they were consecrated, before the moment when they would have been killed.
⁶¹
It may well be that the human sacrifice (
purusha-medha
[“sacrifice of a man”]) was simply a part of the Brahmin imaginary, a fantasy of “the sacrifice to end all sacrifices.”
⁶²

What is most likely is that these texts are saying that human beings are, like all other animals, fit to be sacrificed to the gods, that they are, as it were, the livestock of the gods.
⁶³
What animals are to us, we are to the gods. There was a strong symbolic connection (explicit in many sacrifices and perhaps implicit in all of them) between the ancient Indian human sacrificer and the animal victim. When the sacrificer was initiated, he was consecrated as the victim in the animal sacrifice: “When he performs the animal sacrifice he ransoms himself, a male by means of a male. For the sacrificial victim is a male, and the sacrificer is a male. And this, this flesh, is the best food to eat, and that is how he becomes an eater of the best food to eat.”
⁶⁴
In a sense, every sacrifice ransoms the sacrificer from death.

Even if human sacrifice was not a part of the extant Vedic ritual, it continued to cast its shadow upon that ritual.
⁶⁵
One Brahmana text arranges the five victims in what seems to be a chronological order:

This text explains how “sacrificeability” travels down the line from the human (male) through the other
pashus
until it lodges in grains (such as rice and barley, which, it may be recalled, “scream soundlessly”), each substituting for the one above it. The sacrificial rice cake is a substitute or symbol (
pratima
) for the animal sacrifice by which the sacrificer redeems himself from the gods.
⁶⁷
The sacrificial quality that goes from the man to the horse, bull, ram, and goat sets the pattern for the myth in the
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
(1.4.3-4) in which the father god rapes his daughter, who flees from him in the form of a cow, a mare, a donkey, a goat, and a ewe, only to be caught and raped by him in the form of a bull, stallion, male donkey, goat, and ram.
^ch
In both of these texts, the first victim in the series is a human being, and the rest of the group consists of the (other) sacrificial animals.

A similar substitution of a plant prevents a human sacrifice in another Brahmana myth: A king’s son is to be sacrificed to Varuna; a Brahmin sells his young son Shunahshepha (“Dog Prick,” a most unusual name for a Brahmin) as a substitute for the king’s son; the Ashvins rescue Shunahshepha by substituting a soma plant for him
^ci
as the sacrificial offering.
⁶⁸
This is hardly a brief for human sacrifice; the king obtained the son in the first place only by promising that he would sacrifice him (a self-defeating scenario that we know from Rumpelstiltskin), and Shunahshepha’s father is denounced as a monster who has committed an act for which there is no restoration, an act unprecedented even among Shudras. These myths are not historical explanations of a transition from human sacrifice to animal and vegetable sacrifice; they are meditations on the nature of ritual symbolism, explaining how it is that plants or mantras stand for animals, and animals for humans, in the sacrifice.

An early Upanishad, shortly after the composition of the Brahmanas, spelled out the malevolent implications of the inclusion of humans as sacrificial victims: “Whoever among gods, sages, or men became enlightened became the very self of the gods, and the gods have no power to prevent him. But whoever worships a divinity as other than himself is like a sacrificial animal [
pashu
] for the gods, and each person is of use to the gods just as many animals would be of use to a man. Therefore it is not pleasing to those [gods] that men should become enlightened.”
⁶⁹
Thus, human men and women are the gods’ sacrificial sheep.
⁷⁰
This is the second alliance with a vengeance.

THE HORSE SACRIFICE REVISITED, II

Women played an essential role in the second phase of the horse sacrifice, where the goals of political domination and religious restoration were joined by a third goal, fertility. Four of the king’s wives (the chief queen, the favorite wife, the rejected wife, and a fourth wife
⁷¹
) mimed
^cj
copulation with the stallion, and other women (one maiden and four hundred female attendants) played subsidiary roles.
⁷²
The stallion stood both for the king and for the god (usually Prajapati, the Lord of Creatures, but sometimes Indra),
⁷³
while the queen represented the fertile earth that the king both ruled and impregnated; the ceremony was intended to produce a good crop for the people and offspring for the king.
⁷⁴
The stallion, generally the right-hand horse of the chariot team,
⁷⁵
was probably killed, suffocated, before this part of the ceremony. Even in the
Rig Veda
there are hints that the ritual may have included the mimed copulation of the queen with the stallion; one obscene Vedic poem (10.86) may be a satire on the horse sacrifice, with a sexually challenged male monkey playing the role of a mock stallion.
⁷⁶
But the Brahmanas are the first texts to describe it in any detail; only there is there available light to let us see it clearly.

One text that we have already considered, the text that speaks of the king’s eating the people, also glosses several lines from the obscene banter with the queens that accompanies the ritual copulation in the horse sacrifice: “‘The little female bird rocks back and forth as he thrusts the penis into the slit.’ Now, that bird is really the people, for the people rock back and forth at the thrust of the royal power, and the slit is the people, and the penis is the royal power, which presses against the people; and so the one who has royal power is hurtful to the people.”
⁷⁷
On the analogy of the ritual copulation, this text is saying that the king rapes the people. It thus proclaims, in brutal and obscene language, the violence of royal oppression.

Just as evil females (female antigods), in the form of queens or bitches, threatened to destroy the sacrifice (and the sacrificer), so good women (wives) posed a danger to the sacrificer through the likelihood that they would stop being good. This danger affected even the gods:

Mingled in with an arcane etiology (the origins of the turbans of charioteers) is a tale of a wife who fails, or claims to fail, to tell her husband from his son. That Kutsa and Indra are indistinguishable is an idea that begins in the
Rig Veda
(4.1.10) and is reflected more generally in the Hindu view that the son is made out of the father’s self, or actually is that self reborn, and is therefore essentially identical with him.

As wealth accumulates in the Ganges Valley, inheritance becomes an issue, and so does the fidelity of married women. The relatively lax attitude to women in the
Rig Veda
has largely sunk into the fertile mud of the Ganges Valley; things close down for women, the gates of sexual freedom clang shut. Urbanization gave some women both property rights and more sexual freedom, but that very freedom inspired fears that led others to marry off their daughters at a younger age and to lower the ritual status of married women. We cannot take stories about goddesses (or, for that matter, stories about real women) as information about real women, and attitudes to women are often the inverse of attitudes to goddesses, but changes in what is imagined as possible for goddesses in their anthropomorphic roles as wives and mothers do suggest general shifts in attitudes to women.