CHAPTER 6
CHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES BCE)
1100-1000 Vedic texts mention the Doab (the area between the two [do] rivers [ab], the Ganges and the Yamuna)
c. 1000 The city of Kaushambi in Vatsa is founded
c. 9501 The Mahabharata battle is said to have taken place
c. 900 The city of Kashi (Varanasi, Benares) is founded
c. 800-600 The Brahmanas are composed
HUMANS AND CATTLE
In the beginning, the skin of cattle was the skin that humans have
now, and the skin of a human was the skin that cattle have now. Cattle
could not bear the heat, rain, flies, and mosquitoes. They went to
humans and said, “Let this skin be yours and that skin be ours.”
“What would be the result of that?” humans asked. “You could eat
us,” said the cattle, “and this skin of ours would be your clothing.”
And so they gave humans their clothing. Therefore, when the sacrificer
puts on a red hide, he flourishes, and cattle do not eat him in the
other world; for [otherwise] cattle do eat a human in the other world.
Jaiminiya Brahmana (c. 600 BCE)2
Concerns for the relationship between humans and animals, and with retribution in “the other world,” are central issues in the Brahmanas. Many new ideas are introduced in the form of folktales, some of which are alluded to, but not narrated, in the Rig Veda, while others may come from non-Vedic parts of Indian culture.
THE CITIES ON THE GANGES
Where the Rig Veda expressed uncertainty and begged the gods for help, the Brahmanas (mythological, philosophical, and ritual glosses on the Vedas) express confidence that their infallible Vedic verses (mantras) can deal with all dangers. Troubled by the open-ended refrain of the Rig Vediccreation poem that could only ask, “Who is the god whom we should honor with the oblation?” the Brahmanas invented a god whose name was the interrogative pronoun Who (ka, cognate with the Latin quis, French qui). One text explained it: The creator asked the god Indra (whose own existence, you may recall, was once in doubt), “Who am I?,” to which Indra replied, “Just who you just said” (i.e., “I am Who”), and that is how the creator got the name of Who.3 So too in one Vedic ceremony,4 when the ritual subject goes to heaven and comes back again, he must say, on his return, “I am just who I am.” Read back into the Vedic poem (as it was in later Vedic commentaries5), this resulted in an affirmative statement: “Indeed, Who is the god whom we should honor with the oblation,” somewhat reminiscent of the famous Abbott and Costello routine “Who’s on first?” But this sacerdotal arrogance closed down some of those openings through which fresh theological air had flowed. The question became the answer.
What can account for this dramatic shift in tone, from questions to answers? In part, it was caused by a major change in the living conditions of the authors of these texts. For the Brahmanas were composed during one of the most significant geographical and social shifts in the history of Hinduism, a period that has been called the second urbanization6 (the first being that of the Indus Valley), a time of social and intellectual transformation so extreme that it could well be called revolutionary. Let us, as usual, ground our discussion of the religious texts in a quick snapshot of the material lives of their authors.
From about 1100 to 1000 BCE, Vedic texts begin to mention the Doab (“Two Waters”), the land between the Ganges and the Yamuna (Jumna), the site of the city of Hastinapur (east of the present Delhi), and the scene in which most of the Mahabharata is set. Then, in about 900 BCE, we find references to an area farther down in the western and middle Ganges Valley, where people built palaces and kingdoms. Just as the migrations of the Vedic people into the Punjab probably took place gradually, through several different incursions, so too the move to the Ganges took place incrementally over several centuries. The political changes were correspondingly gradual. Though the Vedas refer to kings, they were really rulers of relatively small, and transitory, political units, numerous small chiefdoms; so too the leaders of the early political units on the Ganges were said to be “kings in name only” (raja-shabdin), and a later Buddhist text mocked them, remarking that each one said, “I am the king! I am the king!”7 Now, however, a few big, powerful kingdoms begin to emerge.
Among the first cities were Kashi, later known as Varanasi (or Benares, the capital of Koshala/Videha), and, southeast of Hastinapur and west of Kashi, the city of Kaushambi (in Vatsa, now Uttar Pradesh), whose stratigraphy suggests a founding date of between 1300 and 1000 BCE.8 The Brahmanas must have been composed a few centuries after the founding of these cities, for considerable time must have passed since the composition of the Rig Veda (even of the first and last books, one and ten, which are already noticeably later than the other eight), since the language of the Brahmanas is significantly different, somewhat like the shift from Beowulf to Chaucer in early English. The Brahmanas cite Vedic verses and explain them, describing the circumstances under which those verses were first created. Not only the language but the nature of the texts changed: Between 1000 and 500 BCE, Vedic rituals spawned more and more commentaries, and by the sixth century BCE the different schools, or branches (shakhas), had been well established.9
During the first millennium BCE, the Vedic people settled down and built things to last. They continued to move east across North India and to take control of the river trade, forests, and rich deposits of minerals.10 First they moved east from the Punjab to Magadha (Bihar) and the lower Ganges and later, in a backflow, west from the Ganges to Gujarat. The main crop now shifted from wheat to rice, which yielded a far greater surplus, and they used water buffalo in its cultivation. Eventually they formed cities and states, building urban societies along the Ganges, utilizing the agricultural surplus of wet rice and other crops that benefited from irrigation and control of the river floodings.
They moved partly in search of deposits of iron, which they developed from about 800 BCE (though a better quality was developed by about 60011); its use was predominant in the western Ganges plain in the first millennium BCE and spread from the Indo-Gangetic watershed to the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna.12 In the Rig Veda, the word ayas means “bronze”; later the Atharva Veda distinguishes red ayas (“bronze”) from dark ayas (“iron”). First used for pins and other parts of horse harnesses, as well as for weapons, iron was not imported but was developed in India, primarily from rich lodes in what is now southern Bihar.13
CLASS CONFLICTS
The surplus that became available along the banks of the Ganges meant a new kind of social and economic power. It meant the organization and redistribution of raw materials and the greater stratification of society, in part because the growing of rice is a complex process that requires a higher degree of cooperation than was needed for herding or for simpler forms of agriculture. As labor became more specialized, sharper lines now divided each of the three top classes one from another and divided all of them from the fourth class, of servants.
More extensive kingship also meant more extravagant sacrifices, which in turn required still more wealth. New forms of political and social organization required new forms of ritual specialization. The early cities were ritual complexes, living statements about royal power.14 The great kingship rituals such as the royal consecration rites and the horse sacrifice responded to a perceived need for an outward justification of the power exercised by “the emerging kingdoms with their increasingly stratified societies and their multi-lingual, multicultural and multi-racial populations.”15 The ceremony of royal consecration became a highly elaborate affair, involving a period of symbolic exile, a chariot race, and a symbolic gambling match, all of which were to have long-lasting resonances in the narrative literature. And such complex sacrifices required a more complex math, astronomy, geometry; they also led to a more precise knowledge of animal anatomy.16 Above all, the importance laid upon the precise words used in the rituals, the mantras, inspired the development of an elaborate system of grammar, which remained the queen of the sciences in India (as theology was for medieval Christianity). The more complex sacrifices also required a more complex priesthood, leading to questions about the qualifications of those claiming the title.
Thus texts of this period define a true Brahmin in terms that transcend birth: “Why do you enquire about the father or the mother of a Brahmin? When you find knowledge in someone, that is his father and his grandfather.”17 And other texts similarly question class lines. One follows the typical Brahmana pattern of explaining the circumstances under which a sage “sees” or “hears” a particular Vedic hymn.
THE SAGES AND THE SON OF A SLAVE WOMAN
Sages performing a sacrifice on the banks of the river Sarasvati drove Kavasha, the son of Ilusha, away from the soma, calling him the son of a slave woman and saying: “How did he ever come to be consecrated among us? Let him die of thirst, but he must not drink the water of the Sarasvati.” When he was alone in the desert, tormented by thirst, he composed a Vedic poem [10.30], and the Sarasvati came to him and surrounded him with her waters. When the sages saw this, they realized, “The gods know him; let us call him back.”18
In this story, a person from outside the society of the upper classes is assimilated into the inner sanctum of the Vedic priesthood. The sages call him a son of a slave woman, Dasi-putra, a term usually designating the son of a Shudra mother, in this case also the son of a man named Ilusha, presumably a Brahmin.
Shudras and Vaishyas play increasingly important roles in the Brahmanas. The surplus supported kings and an administrative bureaucracy and made a greater demand on the people who produced the wealth, taxation of a portion of the whole crop (according to Manu, a sixth of the crop).19 The word bali, which originally meant (and continued to mean) an offering to gods, now also came to mean a tax paid to kings. This burden alienated at least some of the people, as we learn from one Brahmana:
THE KING EATS THE PEOPLE
“When a deer eats the barley, the farmer does not hope to nourish the animal; when a low-born woman becomes the mistress of a noble man, her husband does not hope to get rich on that nourishment.” Now, the barley is the people, and the deer is the royal power; thus the people are food for the royal power, and so the one who has royal power eats the people. And so the king does not raise animals; and so one does not anoint as king the son of a woman born of the people.20
Though this text, like most texts of the ancient period, was ultimately passed through a Brahmin filter and therefore surely represents the interests of Brahmins in criticizing the king, it just as surely also captures (if only to use it for Brahminical purposes) the abuse, and the resentment, of people who, not being Brahmins, did not have immediate access to the text. Yet in addition to proclaiming the brutality of the king, it assumes that class lines cannot be crossed, a lowborn man should not allow his wife to have a highborn lover, and a man of the people (a Vaishya) cannot be king.
The sacrifice was far from the only royal concern, as the historian Romila Thapar explains:
The point at which wealth could be accumulated and spent on a variety of adjuncts to authority marked the point at which kingship was beginning to draw on political authority, rather than ritual authority alone. However, the ritual of the sacrifice as a necessary precondition to kingship could not become a permanent feature. Once kingdoms were established there were other demands on the wealth that went to support the kingdoms.21
Ritual authority was thus supplemented by other trappings of authority, including armies and tax collectors. These expenses would drain the money that had previously been given to the priests for sacrifices, fueling the growing animosity between rulers and priests, an animosity so central to the history of Hinduism that it has been called “the inner conflict of tradition.”22
KINGS AND PRIESTS
The move down from the Punjab to the Ganges also sowed the seeds of a problem that was to have repercussions throughout the history of Hinduism: The Vedic people no longer had good grazing lands for their horses, and so it was no longer possible for every member of the tribe to keep a horse. The horse became a rich man’s beast, now a hierarchical as well an imperialist animal, but it retained its power as a popular cultural symbol, one whose meaning continued to shift in each new age all through subsequent Indian history. Horses and their power to destroy are at the heart of a story about conflicts between the two upper classes. In battle, the warrior stood on the left of the two-man chariot, holding his bow in one hand and his arrows in the other, while the charioteer, literally the warrior’s right-hand man, held the reins in his right hand and a shield in front of both of them with his left hand, so that the archer would have both hands free to shoot. In this story, the king stands in the place of the warrior, holding not a weapon but a whip, while his royal chaplain or domestic priest (Purohita) serves as the charioteer, literally and figuratively holding the reins:
THE KING AND THE PRIEST IN THE CHARIOT
Vrisha was the royal chaplain (Purohita) of Triyaruna, king of the Ikshvakus. Now, in the old days the royal chaplain would hold the reins in the chariot for the king in order to watch out for the king, to keep him from doing any harm. As the two of them were driving along, they cut down with the wheel of the chariot the son of a Brahmin, a little boy playing in the road. One of them [the king] had driven the horses forward, while the other [the priest] had tried to pull them to one side, but they came on so hard that he could not pull them aside. And so they had cut down the boy. They argued with each other about it, and the priest threw down the reins and stepped down from the chariot. The king said, “The one who holds the reins is the driver of the chariot. You are the murderer.” “No,” said the priest, “I tried to pull back to avoid him, but you drove the horses on. You are the murderer.” Finally they said, “Let us ask,” and they went to ask the Ikshvakus. The Ikshvakus said, “The one who holds the reins is the driver. You are the murderer,” and they accused Vrisha, the priest.
He prayed, “Let me get out of this; let me find help and a way out. Let that boy come to life.” He saw this mantra [9.65.28-29] and brought the boy to life with it.cd . . . For this is a mantra that cures and makes restoration. And it is also a mantra that gives you what you want. Whoever praises with this mantra gets whatever he wants.23
The text, right from the start, casts a jaundiced eye upon the king; it assumes that you can’t let a king out alone without his keeper, the Brahmin, who goes along “to keep him from doing harm”—that is, from indulging in the royal addictions, here consisting of reckless driving. This is a transformation of the court chaplain’s usual task of washing the blood of battle and executions off the king’s hands after he has sinned.24 In this case, between the two of them they manage to murder an innocent child, in one of the earliest recorded hit-and-run incidents in history. That child is a Brahmin, related to Vrisha by class; in another variant of this story, the dead boy is actually Vrisha’s own son.25 The jury is hardly impartial, being made up entirely of the king’s people, the Ikshvakus, a great northern dynasty, and it is therefore not surprising that they reject the priest’s argument that it was all the king’s fault, whipping the horses on, and rule that it was the priest’s job to rein the horses in. (The text’s statement that this incident happened “in the old days” implies that court chaplains no longer drove chariots, if in fact they ever did; the text metaphorically puts the chaplain in the driver’s seat or makes him the king’s right-hand man, jockeying for power.) The chariot of the senses that a person drives with one (priestly) foot on the brakes and the other (royal) foot on the accelerator is a recurrent image in Hindu philosophy; we have seen a Vedic poem (10.119) in which someone exhilarated (or stoned) on soma says that the drinks have carried him up and away, “Like horses bolting with a chariot.”26 In the Upanishads, as we will soon see, the intellect/charioteer reins in the senses/horses that pull the chariot of the mind.27 In the Bhagavad Gita, the incarnate god Krishna holds the reins for Prince Arjuna, though there Arjuna holds back, and Krishna goads him forward. Charioteers are major players in both the martial and the narrative/ philosophical world.
The point of this story of Vrisha seems to be that royal power trumps priestly power in the courts, since the jury is stacked; the only way that the priest can avoid punishment is by using priestly power to erase the entire crime. The mantra that he uses to do this has wider applications; it assures him that he will always get what he wants, even, apparently, when he wants to raise the dead. This same power will belong to the person who hears the story and thus gains access to the mantra known as the “fruits of hearing” (phala shruti) that comes at the end of many stories of this type: “Whoever knows this” (yo evam veda) gets whatever the protagonist of the story got. (It is guaranteed to work, though it is not foolproof: If you say it and do not get the promised reward, you must have said it wrong somehow.) This is a major innovation of the Brahmana texts: Where the Vedas asked, and hoped, that the gods would help them, the Brahmins of these later texts arrogantly assure the worshiper that they can fix anything.
But the story then goes on to tell us that Vrisha did not get all that he wanted; he did not get justice, vindication.
THE FIRE IN THE WOMAN
But Vrisha was angry, and he went to Jana [his father] and said, “They gave a false and prejudiced judgment against me.” Then the power went out of the fire of the Ikshvakus: If they placed food on the fire in the evening, by morning it still had not been cooked; and if they placed food on the fire in the morning, the same thing happened to it [by evening]. Then they said, “We have displeased a Brahmin and treated him with dishonor. That is why the power has gone out of our fire. Let us invite him back.” They invited him, and he came back, just like a Brahmin summoned by a king. As he arrived, he prayed, “Let me see this power of fire.” He saw this mantra and sang it over the fire. Then he saw this: “The wife of Triyaruna is a flesh-eating ghoul [pishachi]. She is the one who has covered the fire with a cushion and sits on it.” Then he spoke these verses from theRig Veda [5.2.12, 9-10], and as he finished saying them, the power of the fire ran up into her and burned her all up. Then they dispersed that power of the fire properly, here and there [in each house], and the fire cooked for them properly.28
The Rig Veda verses that Vrisha cites refer, obscurely, to the myth in which Agni, the god of fire, is first lost and then found, which is precisely what has happened (again) here.
This part of the story seems to have little to do with the earlier episode, the fight between the king and his priest. Apparently Vrisha is still full of resentment when he recollects what he (but no one else) regards as the injustice of it all, the insolence of royal office. (The jury’s judgment is not, on the face of it, unfair; it is, I should think, reasonable to hold responsible the person who controlled the chariot’s brakes.) Yet the fire vanishes immediately after Vrisha seeks help from Jana, his father, and though Jana does nothing explicit to help his son, there are many other stories (some in this same text) in which Agni (who is, after all, a priest himself) vanishes when a priest is offended, and still others in which an offended Brahmin conjures up a demoness (a ghoul [Pishachi], as here, or an ogress [Rakshasi] or a female antigod [Asuri]) to avenge him when he has been harmed. Either or both of these may be implied here. The point of the second half of the story is therefore a warning never to offend a Brahmin.
But the text also makes a gratuitous swipe at the dangerous sexuality of women, for the fire that the queen hides under her lap and that destroys her by entering her between her legs is essential to the life of the whole community, which needs it to cook not only the sacred oblations but all profane food. Both these types of cooking belong to the wife, who cooks the everyday meals and (by her mere presence at the ritual) makes it possible for her husband to offer the oblations into the fire.29 We will have more occasions to consider the connections between women and fire in Hinduism.
ANIMALS
THE HORSE SACRIFICE REVISITED, I
The Brahmanas now tell us more about the way in which the horse sacrifice, which began as a relatively simple ritual at the time of the Rig Veda, developed into a far more complex and expensive ceremony in this later period. The political symbolism of the Vedic horse sacrifice is blatant: The consecrated white stallion was “set free” to wander for a year before he was brought back home and killed, a ritual enactment of the actual equine wandering typical of Vedic culture. During that year the horse was guarded by an army that “followed” him and claimed for the king any land on which he grazed. By the late Vedic period, when the Vedic people had begun to grow fodder crops, the stallion would have been stabled, and a stabled stallion behaves quite differently from one in the wild; he tends to return to the stable where he has been fed. The idea that he will wander away in the Ganges Valley, as he used to do in his salad days up in the Punjab, was by this time an anachronism, a conscious archaism. The king’s army therefore drove the horse onward and guided him into the neighboring lands that the king intended to take over. (“Doubtless some manipulated the wandering of the horse to save face,” Romila Thapar remarks dryly.30) It is not hard to imagine the scene. People would suddenly run out into the fields, shouting, “Get your goddamn horse out of my field; he’s trampling the crop,” and suddenly a few, or a few hundred, armed men would appear over the brow of the hill and growl, “Say that again?” and the people would reply, “Oh, I beg your pardon, sirs, I didn’t realize—do let your lovely horse graze here, and can we bring you a little something for yourselves?” and the soldiers would then claim all the land the horse had grazed. Thus the ritual that presented itself as a casual equine stroll over the king’s lands was in fact an orchestrated annexation of the lands on a king’s border; a ritual about grazing became a ritual about political aggrandizement. The Vedic drive toward wandering (without settling) had developed into what the Nazis called, euphemistically, incorporation (Anschluss) and nineteenth-century Americans called manifest destiny. No wonder the Sanskrit texts insist that a king had to be very powerful indeed before he could undertake a horse sacrifice, and very few kings did in fact perform this ritual.
In addition to its political purposes, this sacrifice, like most, was designed to restore things that had gone wrong, in this case to restore the king who had been sullied by the bloodshed necessitated by his office. But new things could go wrong during the period when the horse was said to wander freely. So restorations were prescribed if the horse mounted a mare, or became lame, or got sick but not lame, or if the horse’s eye was injured or diseased, or if the horse died in water. Finally:
If the horse should get lost, [the sacrificer] should make a sacrificial offering of three oblations. . . . And even by itself, this ritual finds what has been lost; whatever other thing of his is lost, let him sacrifice with this ritual, and he will surely find it. And if enemies should get the horse, or if the horse should die . . . , they should bring another horse and consecrate it by sprinkling it with water; this is the restoration for that.31
At the end of the ceremony, there is even a restoration for the obscene language that has been an obligatory part of the ritual: “The vital breaths go out of those who speak impure speech in the sacrifice. And so they utter at the end a sweet-smelling mantra, and so they purify their speech and the vital breaths do not go out of them. . . . Thus they purify their speech to keep the gods from going out of the sacrifice.”32 You can fix anything, if you know how and if you are a Brahmin.
DOGS
A dog too played a part in keeping evil out of the sacrifice, and the negative role of the dog is evidence that the lower castes were still essential to the ritual. It may well be that the growing acknowledgment of class distinctions in this period and the formulation of more intense rules of purity and impurity began to find the omnivorous dog a useful symbol of the impure eater, the outsider, in contrast with the noble, herbivorous (i.e., vegetarian) horse. Another factor in the fall of the dog’s status may have been the progressive decline of the Vedic gods Indra, Yama, and Rudra, who were associated with dogs.33
Early in the ceremony the stallion stood in water. Collateral relatives of the king and queen brought to the stallion a “four-eyed” dog (probably a reference to the two eyes plus the two round marks above the eyebrows that many dogs have to this day). Then, when the dog could no longer touch bottom in the water, the son of a whore killed him with a wooden club, saying, “Off with the mortal! Off with the dog!” For, a Brahmana explained, “Truly the dog is evil, one’s fraternal enemy; thus he slays his evil, his fraternal enemy. . . . They say that evil seeks to grasp him who offers the horse sacrifice. He throws the dog beneath the feet of the horse. The horse has a thunderbolt. Thus by a thunderbolt he tramples down evil.”34 The horse then put his right front hoof on the dead dog, while another spell banished any man or dog who might harm the horse.35 The association of the dog with an unclean woman (the whore whose son kills him) and with feet, as well as explicitly with evil, is an indication of his status as a kind of scapegoat, more precisely a scape-dog, onto whom the sins of the community were transferred. The sacrifice of a “four-eyed dog” at the beginning of the horse sacrifice also takes on deeper meaning when interpreted in the context of the ancient Indian game of dice, for the dice are also said to be four-eyed36—that is, marked by four black spots.
Bitches too lose cachet between the Rig Veda and the Brahmanas. The Rig Veda regarded all dogs as the sons of Indra’s beloved brindled bitch Sarama; dogs were called Sons of Sarama (7.55.2-4). In the Brahmanas, Sarama is still a somewhat positive figure; she still finds the cows that the Panis have stolen and resists their bribes of food, as in the earlier text. Indra says, “Since you found our cows, I make your progeny eaters of food,” and the brindled dogs who are Sarama’s descendants “kill even tigers.”37 But now Sarama eats the amniotic sac that contains the waters—just as dogs (and other animals) do eat the afterbirth—which the text regards as an act of murder. The same ambivalence hedges the curse/boon that her progeny will be omnivorous; it’s good to kill tigers but bad to eat the amniotic sac.
Sarama, the ancestress of all dogs, is a good dog, but dogs as a species are bad, for they pollute the oblations by licking them in their attempt to eat them. A number of texts therefore ban dogs from the sacrificial area. The Rig Veda warns the sacrificer to keep “the long-tongued dog” away (9.101.1), and the lawbook of Manu (7.21) warns that if the king does not enforce the law, crows will eat the sacrificial cakes and dogs will lick the oblations. Several Brahmanas tell of ways to destroy an ogress named Long-Tongue (Dirgha-jihva), who licks the milk offering and curdles it38 or licks at the soma all the time.39 Though she is an ogress (Rakshasi), not specifically called a dog, her name is the name of a dog in the Rig Veda, and she does just what dogs are supposed to do: She licks the oblation. This Long-Tongue also just happens to have vaginas on every limb, like another ogress whom Indra destroyed by placing penises on each of his joints and seducing her.40 And so Indra equips Kutsa’s son (Indra’s grandson) in the same way. Then:
LONG-TONGUE AND INDRA’S GRANDSON
They lay together. As soon as he had his way with her, he remained firmly stuck in her. He saw these mantras and praised with them, and with them he summoned Indra. Indra ran against her and struck her down and killed her with his thunderbolt that was made of mantras. Whoever praises with these mantras slays his hateful fraternal rivals and drives away all evil demons.41
Long-Tongue’s long tongue makes her ritually dangerous, and her equally excessive vaginas make her sexually both threatening and vulnerable (eventually immobilized, in an image perhaps suggested by observations of mating dogs, often similarly paralyzed). Despite her grotesque and bestial sexuality, Long-Tongue does no harm, yet she is destroyed. She is more sinned against than sinning. For the point of the Brahmana is that the dangerous bitch (in either canine or human form) is not, ultimately, dangerous—for the man who knows the mantras.
COWS, VEGETARIANISM, AND NONVIOLENCE
Cows are not themselves dangerous (compared with horses and even dogs, not to mention bulls), but they are indirectly responsible for a great deal of trouble in Hinduism. The Brahmanas advise the sacrificer never to stand naked near a cow, for, as we learn from the story that opens this chapter, “Humans and Cattle,” the skin of cattle (pashus) was once our skin, and (the text continues), if a cow sees you naked, she may run away, thinking, “I am wearing his skin,” the implication being that she fears that you might want to take back your skin. The transaction in the other world is here interpreted as the reversal of a reversal: Humans and cattle traded places long ago, and as a result, cattle willingly undertook to supply humans with food and clothing but also, apparently, won the boon of eating humans (and, perhaps, flaying them) in the other world. Nakedness, by reducing humans to the level of the beasts, establishes a reciprocal relationship, rendering human beings vulnerable to the sufferings of beasts—being eaten--when they enter the other world.
Another text adds more detail to the basic idea of reciprocity between humans and animals in the other world; it is a long text, and I will just summarize the main points relevant to this discussion. The story concerns Varuna, the Vedic god of the waters and of the moral law, and his son, Bhrigu, who was a famous priest:
VARUNA’S SON GOES TO HELL
Bhrigu, the son of Varuna, thought he was better than his father, better than the gods, better than the other Brahmins. Varuna thought, “My son doesn’t know anything. Let’s teach him a lesson.” He took away his life’s breaths, and Bhrigu fainted and went beyond this world to the world beyond. There he saw a man cut another man to pieces and eat him; and then a man eating another man, who was screaming; and then a man eating another man, who was soundlessly screaming. He returned from that world and told Varuna what he had seen. Varuna explained that when people who lack true knowledge and offer no oblations cut down trees for firewood, or cook for themselves animals that cry out, or cook for themselves rice and barley, which scream soundlessly, those trees, and animals, and rice and barley take the form of men in the other world and eat those people in return. “How can one avoid that?” asked Bhrigu. And Varuna replied that you avoid it by putting fuel on the sacred fire and offering oblations.42
This text is not just about animals, since trees and barley play an equally important role, but more broadly about all the things used in preparing food (vegetables, animals, and fuel), about consumerism in a very literal sense. Being eaten in the other world is not a punishment for sins but rather a straight reversal of the inevitable (and not condemned) eating in this world. Other Brahmanas confirm this: “Just as in this world men eat cattle and devour them, so in the other world cattle eat men and devour them.”43 And: “Whatever food a man eats in this world, that [food] eats him in the other world.”44 In the Brahmanas, you are, as usual, what you eat, but now in the sense of becoming food for your food.
This experience in the other world is therefore as inevitable as death itself, and just as unpleasant. The soundlessly screaming rice and barley resurfaced in the writings of the great Indian botanist Jagadish Chandra Bose, who moved George Bernard Shaw deeply with his demonstration of an “unfortunate carrot strapped to the table of an unlicensed vivisector.”45 The silent screams in the Sanskrit text have the quality of a nightmare, from which the unconscious Bhrigu flees.
Nowhere, however, does the text suggest that people should stop eating animals (or rice, for that matter). It is possible to avoid the unpleasant consequences of eating; the solution is, as usual in the Brahmanas, to perform the proper rituals, to fix it, to restore anyone who has eaten something alleged to produce unfortunate consequences—if left unrestored. Dangers arise in the context of profane eating and are warded off by sacred feeding (the oblations offered to the gods). Indeed the two are inextricably linked by the belief that it is wrong to take food without offering some, at least mentally, to the gods; in the broadest sense, all human food consists of divine leftovers (later known as prasad [“grace”]). The text is not saying, “Do not eat animals, for then they will eat you,” but, rather, “Be sure to eat animals in the right way, or they will eat you.” One word for “avoidance” (of this retributive devouring) or “restoration” is nishkriti (“undoing”), designating a careful plan by which to repair a mistake that will otherwise bring unwanted consequences, as well as the repayment or redemption of a debt and the expiatory payment for an error. The proper sort of “avoidance” makes the meat safe to eat, as if it were kosher or halal. This accomplishes what the Vedic sacrificial priest achieved when he gave the offering first to Agni and only after that invited the people to eat it; in both cases, a preparatory ritual makes the food safe. This sort of “restoration” (also called prayash-chitta, often wrongly translated as “expiation”) first refers to the measures taken to restore the ritual when it goes wrong (such as fixing the horse in the horse sacrifice). But then it comes to mean the ritual you use to restore something else that might go wrong (the oblation you perform when you eat animals), and finally, the text or the priest tells you how to restore your entire life when it goes wrong (getting rid of your bad karma, making a pilgrimage, surrendering to the god, or whatever else may be prescribed).
The word ahimsa (“nonviolence”) occurs in the Brahmanas primarily in the sense of “safety,” “security.” Yet we can also see the stirrings of another, later meaning of ahimsa—a desire not to harm animals, as well as an uneasiness about eating animals at all.ceIndeed we saw this discomfort even in the Rig Veda in the idea of the cow that yields food without being killed, the cow that Prithu milked, and the reassurance that the sacrificial horse doesn’t really die. The idea of reversals in the other world was easily ethicized (in Jainism and Buddhism and, later, in Hinduism) into the stricter belief that the best way to avoid being eaten in the other world was not merely to eat animals in the proper (sacrificial) way but to stop eating them altogether. The story of Bhrigu does not yet espouse the ideals of nonviolence or vegetarianism, though it probably contributed to the rise of such doctrines.
For it is evident that people did eat meat, including beef, at this period, though in ways that were becoming increasingly qualified. People ate meat mainly on special occasions, such as rituals or when welcoming a guest or a person of high status.46 Eating meat in a sacrifice is not the same as eating meat for dinner, and killing too can be dichotomized in this way,cf as can the eating of cows versus other sorts of meat, though several texts combine the permission for eating meat (including cow) at a sacrifice (where the gods are, after all, the guests) and meat offered to a human guest. “Meat is certainly the best kind of food,” says one text.47 The Brahmanas say that a bull or cow should be killed when a guest arrives, a cow should be sacrificed to Mitra and Varuna, and a sterile cow to the Maruts, and that twenty-one sterile cows should be sacrificed in the horse sacrifice.48For “the cow is food.”49 The grammarian Panini, who may have lived as early as the fifth or sixth century BCE, glossed the word goghna (“cowkiller”) as “one for whom a cow is killed,” that is, a guest (3.4.73).50 A dharma-sutra from the third century BCE specifies: “The meat of milk cows and oxen may be eaten, and the meat of oxen is fit for sacrifice.”51 This textual evidence is further supported, in this period, by archaeological indications, such as cattle bones found near domestic hearths, bearing marks of having been cut, indicating that their flesh was eaten.52
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.
HUMANS AS SACRIFICIAL ANIMALS
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:
HOW HUMANS CEASED TO BE SACRIFICIAL BEASTS
In the beginning, the gods used the Man (purusha) as their sacrificial beast; when he was used, his sacrificial quality went out of him and entered a horse. They used the horse for their sacrifice; when he was used, his sacrificial quality went out of him and entered a bull. They used the bull for their sacrifice; when he was used, his sacrificial quality went out of him and entered a ram. They used the ram for their sacrifice; when he was used, his sacrificial quality went out of him and entered a billy goat.
They used the billy goat for their sacrifice; when he was used, his sacrificial quality went out of him and entered this earth. The gods searched for it by digging, and they found it; it was this rice and barley. And that is why people even now find rice and barley by digging. And as much virile power as these sacrificial beasts would have for him, that very same amount of virile power is in this oblation of rice for him. And that is how the oblation of rice has the completeness that the fivefold animal sacrifice has.66
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 himci 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.
WOMEN
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 wife71) mimedcj 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),73while 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:
INDRA’S WIFE AND INDRA’S SON
Kutsa Aurava (“Thigh-born”) was made out of the two thighs of Indra. Just as Indra was, so was he, precisely as one would be who is made out of his own self. Indra made him his charioteer. He caught him with his wife, Shachi, the daughter of Puloman, and when he asked her, “How could you do this?” she replied, “I could not tell the two of you apart.” Indra said, “I will make him bald, and then you will be able to tell the two of us apart.” He made him bald, but Kutsa bound a turban around his head and went to her. This is the turban that charioteers wear.78
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.
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 goddessesck (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.”81The 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 timecl it has become unthinkable that she would leave the father of her child.82
DEATH
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 ).cm 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 span91 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 text92 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 himto; 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.
FOLKLORE, SACRIFICE, AND DANGER
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?cp97 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 Vedictext 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 mountainscq 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.
THE POWERS OF EVIL AND ADDICTION
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.
Evil originates in the gods themselves and spreads to both antigods and humans. More precisely, it originates in Prajapati, who, as he attempts to create, falls into the grasp of evil. In one myth, a Brahmin rids him of the evil by transforming it into prosperity (Shri) and placing it in cows, in sleep, and in shade.101 It is rare, however, for evil to be so simply transformed into something good; usually it remains evil and is distributed in that form, to the detriment of those who receive it. Thus, in a kind of reverse savior mythology, the gods create forms of evil—delusion (moha), a stain (kalmasha), evil tout court (papa)—that they transfer to humans, who suffer from it forever after. Humans are thus the scapegoats of the gods. In a much-retold myth, Indra becomes infected with Brahminicide—the gold standard of sins—after he kills Vritra (whom the Brahmanas, and all subsequent texts, regard as a Brahmin—a Dasyu Brahmin but a Brahmin). Sometimes Indra gets drunk on soma—his notorious addiction—and on one occasion the Brahminicide flows out of him with the excess soma; from what flows from his nose, a lion arises; from his ears a jackal, from the lower opening of his body, tigers and other wild beasts.102 Thus the divine hangover leaves us to deal with man-eating beasts.
When Indra kills another enemy, also a Brahmin, he distributes the Brahminicide, with compensations:
INDRA TRANSFERS HIS BRAHMINICIDE
He asked the earth to take a third of his Brahminicide, and in return he promised her that if she should be overcome by digging, within a year the dug-out portion would be filled again; and the third of his Brahminicide that she took became a natural fissure. He asked the trees to accept a third, and promised that when they were pruned, more shoots would spring up; the Brahminicide that they took up became sap. Women took a third of the Brahminicide and obtained the boon of enjoying intercourse right up to the birth of their children; their Brahminicide became the garments stained with menstrual blood.103
The boons explain why the distribution is willingly accepted: As long as Indra is polluted, fertility on earth is stymied; it is in the best interests of earth, trees, and women to help Indra out, so that they themselves can remain fertile. (One version of the story inverts the principle and ultimately transfers the sin to abortionists, the enemies of fertility.104) But evil cannot be destroyed; the best that one can hope for is to move it to a place where it will do less harm. Therefore the gods in these stories draw evil’s fangs by breaking it up, sometimes into three pieces and sometimes into four. Blatant self-interest operates in a variant in which Indra’s Brahminicide is “wiped off,” as the text puts it, onto people who make offerings without paying the priests;105 such deadbeats, the bêtes noires of the Brahmin compilers of these texts, are the perfect scapegoats.
Evil on earth in general results from fallout from heaven, from the cosmic struggles of gods and antigods:
GODS, ANTIGODS, HUMANS, AND EVIL
The gods and antigods were striving against one another. The gods created a thunderbolt, sharp as a razor, that was the Man [Purusha]. They hurled this at the antigods, and it scattered them, but then it turned back to the gods. The gods were afraid of it, and so they took it and broke it into three pieces. Then they saw that the divinities had entered humans in the form of Vedic poems. They said, “When this Man has lived in the world with merit, he will follow us by means of sacrifices and good deeds and ascetic heat. We must do something to prevent this. Let us put evil in him.” They put evil in him: sleep, carelessness, anger, hunger, love of dice, desire for women. These are the evils that assail a man in this world. . . . But the gods do not harm the man who knows this, though they do try to destroy the man who tries to harm the man who knows this.106
The gods here do not merely accidentally burden humans with evil that they themselves, the gods, cannot manage; they do it purposely, to prevent humans from going to heaven.cr107 And this evil includes two of the four major addictive vices, love of dice and desire for women. The implications of this major shift in the human-divine contract will continue to spread in generations to follow.
Why does this change take place at this moment? The hardening of the lines between states, the beginning of competition for wealth and power, the scramble for the supremacy of the rich Ganges bottomland may have introduced into the myths a more cynical approach to the problem of dealing with evil. And the growth of both power and the abuse of power among the two upper classes may explain why the gods at this time came to be visualized less like morally neutral (if capricious and often destructive) forces of nature—the fire, soma, rain, and rivers of the Veda—or brutal and sensually addicted but fair-minded human chieftains and more like wealthy and powerful kings and Brahmins, selfish, jealous, and vicious.