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112
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[MAY, 1912.
It is prohibited to eat with people of another caste, to use dishes prepared by people of a lower caste. This is one of the oddities which are surprising to us. Its secret is not impenetrable. We have to think of the religious function, which, at all times, was assigned to the repast by the Aryans,30
As a produce of the sacred hearth, it is the exterior sign of the family community, of its continuity in the past and in the present; from this come the libations, and in India, the daily oblations to the ancestors. Even there where, by the inevitable wear and tear of the institutions, the primitive meaning could be weakened; this signification remains clearly alive in the funeral repast, the perideipnon of the Greeks, the silicernium of the Romans, which, on the occasion of the death of relatives manifests the indissoluble unity of the lineage.31
Proofs are abounding that the repast has preserved with the Hindus a religious significance. The Brahmin neither eats at the same time, nor from the same vessel, not only with a stranger or an inferior, but not even with his proper wife, nor with his own sons that are not yet initiated.32 These scruples are so really of a religious nature that it is prohibited to share the food even of a Brahmin, if for any reason, even an accidental one that is independent of his will, he is under the ban of some defilement.33 Even a Sûdra cannot, without contamination, eat the food of a defiled twice-born,
Impurity communicates itself; it, therefore, excludes from the religious function of the repast. And this is the reason why, by sitting down at a common banquet with his caste-fellows, the sinner who has been excluded temporarily, consecrates his rehabilitation. It is owing to the same prin ciple that, on the solemn marriage of the Romans, bridegroom and bride divide a cake in presence of the sacred fire; the ceremony is essential; it establishes the adoption of the woman into the family religion of the husband. Let us not see in this an isolated whimsical custom; it could be rightly said that the repast made in common was the characteristic act of religion in the worship, which united the curia or the phratria.34
The Roman repasts of the Caristia, which 'united all the kindred excluded not only every stranger, but every relative whose conduct appeared to make him unworthy,35 The Persians had preserved similar usages, 36 The daily repasts of the Prytanies had remained with the Greeks one of the official religious rites of the city. But its menu was not indifferent. The nature of the viands and the kind of wine which had to be served in them were defined by rules which could depend on various causes which it is not the place here to investigate. In excluding such or such articles of food, India did nothing but generalize the application of the principle; it did not invent it altogether. This principle, too, has its analogies and its germs in the common past. A strange thing! The Hindus who, under other aspects, have preserved more faithfully than anybody else, the signification of the common repast, and who, it seems, have extended it, have receded, more than others, from the primitive type in the liturgical form of the funeral banquet, the Sraddha. According to the theory, instead of assembling the relatives, it is offered to Brahmins. But they are put forth as representing the ancestors, and receive the food in their name. Even so, he who offers the sacrifice, must, symbolically at least, associate with them after the manner of the ancestors themselves. This is indeed, in spite of the new ideas which the developed ritual has been able to introduce, the ideal prolongation of the family repast.
51 Leist, Altarisches Jus Civile, p. 201 ss
30 Hearn, p. 32; Fustel de Coulanges, p. 182.
33 Manava Dh. § iv., 43, Apost. Dh. § II, 4, 9, 7 and the note of Bühler.
33 Vishun Smriti, xxii, 8-10.
85 Leist, Altar. Jus Civile, p- 49-50, 263-4.
34 Fustel de Coulanges, p. 135. I bid.
