The Hindus (28 page)

We can see hints of the attrition of women’s independence in the transformations of the myth of Urvashi. In the
Rig Veda
, Urvashi is a heavenly nymph (Apsaras) and swan maiden who sleeps with King Pururavas and abandons him after bearing him a son; she advises him, as she leaves him forever, that “there are no friendships with women; they have the hearts of jackals (10.95.15).” Like other immortal women who live with mortal men, particularly equine goddesses
^ck
(Urvashi is compared with a horse in three verses [10.95.3, 8-9]), she bears him a child and stays with him until he violates his contract with her (“I warned you on that very day, for I knew, but you did not listen to me,” she says to him), whereupon she leaves him and the child and returns to her world.
⁷⁹
The Vedic Urvashi complains that he made love to her too often (“You pierced me with your rod three times a day, and filled me even when I had no desire. I did what you wanted”) and against her will (“You who were born to protect have turned that force against me”).
⁸⁰
But when the story is retold in the
Shatapatha Brahmana
, she
begs
Pururavas to make love to her just that often (“You must strike me with the bamboo reed three times a day”), though she has the forethought to add, “But never approach me when I have no desire.”
⁸¹
The Vedic text implies that his desire is greater than hers, while the Brahmana implies that hers is at least as great, if not greater, an expression of the stereotype of the insatiable woman that will plague Hindu mythology forever after. She threatens to leave him when he fails to keep his promise not to let her look upon him naked. The final transformation is that in the
Rig Veda
he is left longing for her, with a vague promise of reunion in heaven, whereas in the Brahmanas she loves him so much that she not only stays with him but teaches him how to become immortal (a Gandharva). By this time
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it has become unthinkable that she would leave the father of her child.
⁸²

Sacrifice in the Brahmanas was designed to allay the fear of death, a relatively minor consideration in the
Rig Veda
but a pressing concern in the Brahmanas, for which death became the irritating grain of sand that seeded the pearls of thought. The Vedas spoke of another world to which people were presumably assigned after death, and the Brahmanas maintained and refined this belief: Through the sacrifice a man could become immortal, for offering sacrifices generated merit that created for the sacrificer a rebirth after death in heaven (“in the next world”). “Evil Death” is a cliché, an automatic equation throughout this corpus: Death is evil, and the essence of evil is death.
⁸³
Death is the defining enemy of the Lord of Creatures (Prajapati), the creator, but also, sometimes, identical with him or his firstborn son.
⁸⁴
The Brahmanas attempted to tame death by gradual degrees, to enable the sacrificer first to live out a full life span, then to live for a thousand years, and finally to attain a vaguely conceived complete immortality: “Whoever knows this conquers recurring death and attains a life span; this is freedom from death in the other world and life here.”
⁸⁵

But there are always nagging doubts that even the perfect ritual cannot really succeed in conquering death. One can never be made entirely safe; the catch-22 of the sacrificial warrantee is the ever-present danger that one will not live long enough to complete the sacrifice that will grant immortality. This danger appears to threaten even the Lord of Creatures. One text tells us that “even as one might see in the distance the opposite shore, so did he behold the opposite shore of his own life.”
⁸⁶
For he had already tangled with death: “When Prajapati was creating living beings, evil death overpowered him. He generated inner heat for a thousand years, striving to leave that evil behind him, and in the thousandth year he purified himself entirely; the evil that he washed clean is his body. But what man could obtain a life of a thousand years? The man who knows this truth can obtain a thousand years.”
⁸⁷
Prajapati is uniquely qualified to do this ritual because “he was born with a life of a thousand years.”
⁸⁸
But once again, “whoever knows this” will, like the god, live long enough to do the ceremony that will let him live forever.

What the authors of these early texts feared was “old age and death” (
jaramrityu
).
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What they feared most of all was what they called recurrent death, a series of redeaths (and the rebirths that are preludes to them). For the Brahmanas already mention transmigration:
⁸⁹
“When they die they come to life again, but they become the food of this [Death] again and again.”
⁹⁰
To Euro-American thinkers, reincarnation seems to pose a possible solution to the problem of death: If what you fear is the cessation of life (we set aside for the moment considerations of heaven and hell), then the belief that you will in fact live again after you die may be of comfort. How nice to go around again and again, never to be blotted out altogether, to have more and more of life, different lives all the time, perhaps a horse or a dog next time, or an Egyptian queen last time.

But this line of reasoning entirely misses the point of the Hindu doctrine. If it is a terrible thing to grow old and die, once and for all, how much more terrible to do it over and over again. It is like being condemned to numerous life sentences that do not run concurrently. “Recurrent death” may have meant merely a series of ritual deaths within a natural life span
⁹¹
or what the poet T. S. Eliot had in mind when he said, “We die to each other daily.”
^cn
But it probably foreshadowed an actual series of rebirths and redeaths. These were not described in detail until the Upanishads, which transform into a vision of the next life, in
this
world, the things that Bhrigu saw in the other world in the Brahmanas.

The story of Bhrigu’s journey to the other world was briefly retold in another Brahmana text
⁹²
in which the boy, now called Nachiketas, annoys his father (now no longer the god Varuna but a human sacrificer who is giving away all that he has) by asking him three times whom he will give
him
to; his exasperated father finally blurts out, “I’ll give you to Death!” (in a later version he shouts, “I’ll send you to Yama!”—that is, “The devil take you!” or “Go to hell!”
⁹³
), and Nachiketas takes him literally and goes down to the world of the dead. But his father also gives him detailed instructions about what to say and do in the house of Death. Eventually Death offers him three boons, the last of which is that Death teaches Nachiketas how to avoid redeath. And whoever knows the Nachiketas fire and kindles it, the text assures us, conquers redeath. Whereas Bhrigu had a confrontation with animals and learned a lesson about the afterlife from his father, Nachiketas learns the secret from Death himself. And whereas only gods (like Prajapati and Varuna, Bhrigu’s father) confronted Death in the first Brahmana text, here a human boy does this and gains not merely a way of eating animals without unfortunate consequences but liberation from death.

The story of Bhrigu shares much with other tales of journeys to the underworld,
⁹⁴
and the text about exchanging skins is one of a number of widely attested folktales about such exchanges and about animals transformed into people and the reverse.
⁹⁵
The inclusion of folktales in the Brahmanas is an exampleof the co-opting of alternate histories, of other voices—including non-Brahmin voices—sneaking into the text. The Brahmanas are the vehicle for a great deal of material virtually indistinguishable in tone and basic plot from the stories collected by folklorists in nineteenth-century farmhouses.
^co
The Sanskrit of these passages is much more informal and straightforward, even colloquial, than the technical language in which the rest of the Brahmanas are set.
⁹⁶
There are several different sorts of Sanskrit in the Brahmanas, each with its own vocabulary, one for mythology, one for philology and etymology, one for ritual instructions, and so forth. And there is one for folklore. Here again the Brahmanas are revolutionary, in opening up the ritual literature to the narration of folktales.

What are these stories doing in these texts, otherwise so dry, so full of abstruse ritual pedantry?
^cp
97
What is such juicy folklore doing in such dusty old ritual attics? Well, the Brahmanas themselves offer many explicit excuses for telling these stories: to restore details omitted in the
Rig Vedic
text in question, to gloss an allusion or the special circumstances under which a certain sage saw a poem, or to explain why the sacrifice is done in a certain way.
⁹⁸
Some authors of the Brahmanas tamper with the tale to make it serve their purposes. Others, however, make no attempt to connect the story with the sacrifice and tamper with it somewhat less; we may assume that these stories represent at least something of the popular, non-Brahmin world.

The deeper reasons for telling the stories, in both instances, are less obvious than the excuses and are more loosely related to the sacrifice; they illuminate certain shadows of the sacrifice, fears that lie behind the sacrifice. In 700 BCE, the only texts that were memorized and preserved were the Brahmanas, and the sacrifice was the focal point for all forms of creative expression. Thus these texts purporting to gloss the sacrifice attracted to themselves, like magnets, everything else that could be dragged in to express the meaning of life in ancient India. Or rather, since the sacrifice was believed to symbolize everything that was meaningful in human life,
any
compelling insight into that life would eventually gravitate to the traditional literature that was constantly coalescing around the sacrifice. A certain number of myths were already associated with the sacrifice, as is clear from the tantalizing allusions in the
Rig Veda
, but that text did not have a systematized mythology. The Brahmanas tell many “grand” tales of the victory of gods over antigods, but since they also tell folktales about everyday life, the Vedic ritual cannot be the only key to their meaning.

Yet it is the key to a part of their meaning, for these stories too are connected to the sacrifice on a profound level. In particular, images that express the dangers inherent in death and sex became embedded in narratives about sacrifice since the sacrifice itself (as we saw in the horse sacrifice) is about death and sex. Rituals tend to tame those dangers and to express them in terms of a limited range of human actions, to make them public and to make them safe for the sacrificer; they allow people to order and structure their reactions to these dangers in real life, to create a framework that they can then reintroduce into real experience. Stories about monstrous women help us (especially, but not only, if we are men) to express our nightmares about our mothers (and wives). Participating in the formalized structures of someone else’s funeral provides us with a framework within which to contemplate our own death; the “controlled catastrophe” of the sacrifice allowed the sacrificer to offer up a victim who was a substitute for himself, as if to say, “Kill him and not me.”

But the ritual itself introduces new dangers and new fears. What happens if something interferes with the ritual so that it doesn’t work? We have seen the elaborate countermeasures proposed in response to every foreseeable glitch in the horse sacrifice. The soma sacrifice too, so central to Vedic religion, was threatened by the increasing difficulty of obtaining soma, which grew in the mountains
^cq
that the Vedic people had left behind when they moved down to the Ganges.
⁹⁹
This problem was solved in several ways. There had already been, in the
Rig Veda
, a myth of soma coming from afar. Now the Brahmanas elaborated upon the rituals for buying soma and punishing the soma seller and for deciding what things could be used as substitutes when soma was unavailable; some surrogates may have looked like soma, while others may have had a similar effect.
¹⁰⁰
The need for soma surrogates played into one of the ideas underlying the sacrifice itself, that it was, in essence, already a substitute, the victim in the sacrifice substituting for the sacrificer. The need for a substitute for the consciousness-altering soma may also have led to the development of other ways of creating unusual psychic states, such as yoga, breath control, fasting, and meditation.

Nor does the danger in the sacrifice come only from the possibility that one may fail to carry out the ritual properly. The power aroused by the correctly performed ritual may get out of hand, for the ritual involves potentially fatal dangers, which compounded the threats to the sacrificer in normal life. These dangers may come from within, from the sacrificer himself, from the pollution inherent in his human vulnerability and mortality, or they may come from the gods.

In the Brahmanas, in a pattern typical of the first alliance, the enemies of the gods (both antigods in the sky and ogres on earth) threaten the sacrifice, break into it, and pollute it from outside. A significant proportion of the energy of the priests was devoted to fending off the antigods and ogres and to repairing the breaks that they made in the sacrifice, and this activity was part of the ritual. But during this period the balance of power shifts to the second alliance, and it is no longer gods and humans against the powers of evil but gods against humans and the (other) powers of evil. The antigods became more like ogres, more clearly distinguished from the gods by evil rather than merely by competition.