Makaranda Madhukar Anand Mahendale Festshrift

Author(s): M A Dhaky, Jitendra B Shah
Publisher: Shardaben Chimanbhai Educational Research Centre

Page 31

20
Hanns-Peter Schmidt
Makaranda
Paśubandha. Here, however, we may have a case of a burnt offering which is not a gift to the deity, but rather a sacrifice as abandonment and destruction of property
Replacing decapitation by suffocation or strangulation may have several reasons. One is most probably that, by the time of the Brahmanas, blood was considered inauspicious and its spilling on the place of sacrifice polluting. The blood is dedicated to the Rākṣasas who are to stay in the deepest depth and be joined by the sacrificer's enemies". Only on two occasions is it made ritual use of once in the Aśvamedha", where cooked blood is offered to Agni Svistakṛt = Rudra; here the Devas, identifying themselves with the Agnayah Svistakṛtaḥ, take the blood for themselves in order to defeat the Asuras the reasoning for which may well be that by incorporating the ambiguous Rudra his possibly destructive interference is neutralized. The other occasion is the Sulagava, dedicated to Rudra, where the blood is offered to the snakes" or to Rudra and his cohorts"
The fact that non-Aryan people used decapitation and offered the head and the blood to the deity, as practised until to-day in the sacrifice to Kāli, may have contributed to the change.
It has been suggested that one of the reasons for preferring suffocation was the desire to preserve the animal whole15. This can be supported by the sacrificer's wife's sprinkling the eyes, ears, nostrils and mouth of the immolated animal in order to quicken it. The openings of the head are the seats of the vital airs (prāna) and thus the head is one of the most important parts of the body, second only to the omentum which is identified as the chief part (agra)". In one instance the pollution of the animal caused by Viśvarupa is remedied by anointing it and thus making it pure again (see above n. 8), but this did not apply to the head. However, the parts not fit for sacrifice, including the head, are placed on the Vedi together with the cooked part and reinvigorated with the vital breaths präna and apāna so that the animal is restored in the beyond1.
In the Vedic texts there is, to my knowledge, no explicit reference to the victim's being preserved whole. But that the idea was current in antiquity is attested by the Greek author Strabo (first century B.C.) who states