Great Indian Religion

Author(s): G T Bettany
Publisher: Ward Lock Bowden and Co

Page 33

ANIMAL SACRIFICE.
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Not yet within the region of dates and relation to known persons, we come to the next great division of ancient Hindu literature, the Brahmanas, which The exhibit to us a fully developed sacrificial system, Brahmanas. and are intended for the use of the priests or Brahmans. We find here a series of prose compositions describing the connection of the sacred songs and words with the sacrificial rites. They may date from the seventh or eighth centuries B.C. We see in them, as in the case of so many priesthoods, the tendency to elaborate, to develop a ritual which could only be carried out by an hereditary caste, and which furnished a means of demanding large contributions from the votaries. The length of the Brahmanas themselves is wearisome, and is matched by their dogmatic assertion and their complex symbolism. Each of the collections of Vedic hymns has its proper Brahmanas, there being no fewer than eight Brahmanas to the SamaVeda. Besides ceremonial directions, these Brahmanas contain numerous materials for tracing the growth of Hindu religious ideas. In one story of a king Human who had no son, after extolling the benefits sacrifice. that a son brings, the king offers, if a son be born to him, to sacrifice him to Varuna. When the son was born and was told of his destiny, he refused, and left his father's home. Disappointed of his victim, Varuna afflicted the father with dropsy. The son wandering for years in the forest, at last found a Brahman hermit in distress, whose second son voluntarily offered to be sold in order that he might be sacrificed instead of the king's son. Finally the substitute, by the virtue of Vedic prayers, was released from sacrifice. Another narrative describes how the gods killed a man for their Animal victim, and the part of him fit for sacrifice sacrifice. entered successively into a horse, an ox, a sheep, and a goat, which were all sacrificed in turn. The sacrificial element remained longest in the goat, which thus became specially fit for sacrifice. Here we may see how an introduced human sacrifice may have been replaced by animal sacrifice.
In the Satapatha-Brahmana, perhaps the most interest