Read the book: «The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India, Volume 3», page 34

7. Animals worshipped in India

Finally, in India we have Hanumān, originally the deified ape, about whose identity there can be no doubt as he still retains his monkey’s tail in all sculpture. Bhairon, the watchman of Mahādeo’s temples, rides on a black dog, and was perhaps originally the watch-dog, or in his more terrible character of the devourer of human beings, the wolf. Ganesh or Ganpati has the head of an elephant and rides on a rat and appears to have derived his divine attributes from both these animals, as will be explained elsewhere;³⁵⁵ Kartikeya, the god of war, rides on a peacock, and as the peacock is sacred, he may originally have been that bird, perhaps because its plumes were a favourite war emblem. Among his epithets are Sarabhu, born in the thicket, Dwādasakara and Dwādasāksha, twelve-handed and twelve-eyed. He was fostered by the maidens who make the Pleiades, and his epithet of twelve-eyed may be taken from the eyes in the peacock’s feathers.³⁵⁶ But, like the Greek gods, the Hindu gods have now long become anthropomorphic, and only vestiges remain of their animal associations. Enough has been said to show that most of the pantheons are largely occupied by deified animals and birds.

8. The sacrificial meal

The original sacrifice was that in which the community of kinsmen ate together the flesh of their divine or totem animal-god and drank its blood. In early religion the tribal god was the ancestor and relative of the tribe. He protected and fostered the tribe in its public concerns, but took no special care of individuals; the only offences of which he took cognisance were those against the tribe as a whole, such as shedding a kinsman’s blood. At periodical intervals the tribe renewed their kinship with the god and each other by eating his flesh together at a sacrificial meal by which they acquired his divine attributes; and every tribesman was not only invited, but bound, to participate. “According to antique ideas those who eat and drink together are by this very act tied to one another by a bond of friendship and mutual obligation. Hence when we find that in ancient religions all the ordinary functions of worship are summed up in the sacrificial meal, and that the ordinary intercourse between gods and men has no other form, we are to remember that the act of eating and drinking together is the solemn and stated expression of the fact that all who share the meal are brethren, and that the duties of friendship and brotherhood are implicitly acknowledged in their common act.³⁵⁷ The one thing directly expressed in the sacrificial meal is that the god and his worshippers are commensals, but every other point in their mutual relations is included in what this involves. Those who sit at meat together are united for all social effects; those who do not eat together are aliens to one another, without fellowship in religion and without reciprocal social duties. The extent to which this view prevailed among the ancient Semites, and still prevails among the Arabs, may be brought out most clearly by reference to the law of hospitality. Among the Arabs every stranger whom one meets in the desert is a natural enemy, and has no protection against violence except his own strong hand or the fear that his tribe will avenge him if his blood be spilt. But if I have eaten the smallest morsel of food with a man I have nothing further to fear from him; ‘there is salt between us,’ and he is bound not only to do me no harm, but to help and defend me as if I were his brother. So far was this principle carried by the old Arabs that Zaid-al-Khail, a famous warrior in the days of Muhammad, refused to slay a vagabond who carried off his camels, because the thief had surreptitiously drunk from his father’s milk-bowl before committing the theft.”³⁵⁸ It is in this idea that the feeling of hospitality originally arose. Those who ate together the sacred food consisting of the body of the god were brothers, and bound to assist each other and do each other no harm; and the obligation extended in a modified form to all food partaken of together, more especially as with some races, as the ancient Romans and the Hindus, all the regular household meals are sacred; they may only be partaken of after purifying the body, and a portion of the food at each meal is offered to the gods. “There was a sworn alliance between the Lihyān and the Mostalic—they were wont to eat and drink together. This phrase of an Arab narrator supplies exactly what is wanted to define the significance of the sacrificial meal. The god and his worshippers are wont to eat and drink together, and by this token their fellowship is declared and sealed.”³⁵⁹

9. Primitive basis of kinship

The primitive idea of kinship rested on this participation in the sacrificial meal, and not on blood-relationship. “In ancient times the fundamental obligations of kinship had nothing to do with degrees of relationship, but rested with absolute and identical force on every member of the clan. To know that a man’s life was sacred to me and that every blood-feud that touched him involved me also, it was not necessary for me to count cousinship with him by reckoning up to our common ancestor; it was enough that we belonged to the same clan and bore the same clan-name. What was my clan was determined by customary law, which was not the same in all stages of society; in the earliest Semitic communities a man was of his mother’s clan, in later times he belonged to the clan of his father. But the essential idea of kinship was independent of the particular form of the law. A kin was a group of persons whose lives were so bound up together, in what must be called a physical unity, that they could be treated as parts of one common life. The members of one kindred looked on themselves as one living whole, a single animated mass of blood, flesh, and bones, of which no member could be touched without all the members suffering. This point of view is expressed in the Semitic tongues in many familiar forms of speech. In case of homicide Arabian tribesmen do not say, ‘The blood of M or N has been spilt,’ naming the man; they say, ‘Our blood has been spilt.’ In Hebrew the phrase by which one claims kinship is, ‘I am your bone and your flesh.’ Both in Hebrew and in Arabic ‘flesh’ is synonymous with ‘clan’ or kindred group.”³⁶⁰ Similarly in India a Hindu speaks of any member of his subcaste or clan as his bhai or brother.

“Indeed, in a religion based on kinship, where the god and his worshippers are of one stock, the principle of sanctity and that of kinship are identical. The sanctity of a kinsman’s life and the sanctity of the godhead are not two things but one; for ultimately the only thing which is sacred is the common tribal life or the common blood which is identified with the life. Whatever being partakes in this life is holy, and its holiness may be described indifferently as participation in the divine life and nature, or as participation in the kindred blood.”³⁶¹

10. The bond of food

“At a later period the conception is found current that any food which two men partake of together, so that the same substance enters into their flesh and blood, is enough to establish some sacred unity of life between them; but in ancient times this significance seems to be always attached to participation in the flesh of a sacrosanct victim, and the solemn mystery of its death is justified by the consideration that only in this way can the sacred cement be procured which creates or keeps alive a living bond of union between the worshippers and their god. This cement is nothing less than the actual life of the sacred and kindred animal, which is conceived as residing in its flesh, but especially in its blood, and so, in the sacred meal, is actually distributed among all the participants, each of whom incorporated a particle of it with his own individual life.”³⁶²

11. The blood-feud

It thus appears that the sacrifice of the divine animal which was the god of the tribe or clan, and the eating of its flesh and drinking of its blood together, was the only tangible bond or obligation on which such law and morality as existed in primitive society was based. Those who participated in this sacrifice were brothers and forbidden to shed each other’s blood, because in so doing they would have spilt the blood of the god impiously and unlawfully; the only lawful occasion on which it could be shed being by participation of all the clan or kinsmen in the sacrificial meal. All other persons outside the clan were strangers or enemies, and no rights or obligations existed in connection with them; the only restraint on killing them being the fear that their kinsmen would take blood-revenge, not solely on the murderer, but on any member of his clan. A man’s life was protected only by this readiness of his clansmen to avenge him; if he slew a fellow-kinsman, thus shedding the blood of the god which flowed in the veins of every member, or committed any other great impiety against the god, he was outlawed, and henceforth there was no protection for his life except such as he could afford himself by his own strength. This reflection puts the importance of the blood-feud in primitive society in a clear light. It was at that time really a beneficent institution, being the only protection for human life; and its survival among such backward races as the Pathāns and Corsicans, long after the State has undertaken the protection and avenging of life and the blood-feud has become almost wholly useless and evil, is more easily understood.

12. Taking food together and hospitality

The original idea of the sacrificial meal was that the kinsmen in concert partook of the body of the god, thereby renewing their kinship with him and with each other. By analogy, however, the tie thus formed was extended to the whole practice of eating together. It has been seen how a stranger who partook of food with an Arab became sacred and as a kinsman to his host and all the latter’s clan for such time as any part of the food might remain in his system, a period which was conventionally taken as about three days. “The Old Testament records many cases where a covenant was sealed by the parties eating and drinking together. In most of these the meal is sacrificial, and the deity is taken in as a third party to the covenant. But in Joshua i. 14 the Israelites enter into alliance with the Gibeonites by taking of their victuals without consulting Jehovah. A formal league confirmed by an oath follows, but by accepting the proffered food the Israelites are already committed to the alliance.”³⁶³ From the belief in the strength and sanctity of the tie formed by eating together the obligation of hospitality appears to be derived. And this is one of the few moral ideas which are more binding in primitive than in civilised society.

13. The Roman sacra

“A good example of the clan sacrifice, in which a whole kinship periodically joins, is afforded by the Roman sacra gentilicia. As in primitive society no man can belong to more than one kindred, so among the Romans no one could share in the sacra of two gentes—to do so was to confound the ritual and contaminate the purity of the gens. The sacra consisted in common anniversary sacrifices, in which the clansmen honoured the gods of the clan, and after them the whole kin, living and dead, were brought together in the service.”³⁶⁴

14. The Hindu caste-feasts

The intense importance thus attached to eating in common on ceremonial occasions has a very familiar ring to any one possessing some acquaintance with the Indian caste-system. The resemblance of the gotra or clan and the subcaste to the Greek phratry and phule and the Roman gens and curia or tribe has been pointed out by M. Emile Senart in Les Castes dans l’Inde. The origin of the subcaste or group, whose members eat together and intermarry, cannot be discussed here. But it seems probable that the real bond which unites it is the capacity of its members to join in the ceremonial feasts at marriages, funerals, and the readmission of members temporarily excluded, which are of a type closely resembling and seemingly derived from the sacrificial meal. Before a wedding the ancestors of the family are formally invited, and when the wedding-cakes are made they are offered to the ancestors and then partaken of by all relatives of the family as in the Roman sacra. In this case grain would take the place of flesh as the sacrificial food among a people who no longer eat the flesh of animals. Thus Sir J. G. Frazer states: “At the close of the rice harvest in the East Indian island of Buro each clan (fenna) meets at a common sacramental meal, to which every member of the clan is bound to contribute a little of the new rice. This meal is called ‘eating the soul of the rice,’ a name which clearly indicates the sacramental character of the repast. Some of the rice is also set apart and offered to the spirits.”³⁶⁵ Grain cooked with water is sacred food among the Hindus. The bride and bridegroom worship Gauri, perhaps a corn-goddess, and her son Ganesh, the god of prosperity and full granaries. It has been suggested that yellow is the propitious Hindu colour for weddings, because it is the colour of the corn.³⁶⁶ At the wedding feast all the guests sit knee to knee touching each other as a sign of their brotherhood. Sometimes the bride eats with the men in token of her inclusion in the brotherhood. In most castes the feast cannot begin until all the guests have come, and every member of the subcaste who is not under the ban of exclusion must be invited. If any considerable number of the guests wilfully abstain from attending it is an insult to the host and an implication that his own position is doubtful. Other points of resemblance between the caste feast and the sacrificial meal will be discussed elsewhere.

15. Sacrifice of the camel

The sacrifice of the camel in Arabia, about the period of the fourth century, is thus described: “The camel chosen as the victim is bound upon a rude altar of stones piled together, and when the leader of the band has thrice led the worshippers round the altar in a solemn procession accompanied with chants, he inflicts the first wound while the last words of the hymn are still upon the lips of the congregation, and in all haste drinks of the blood that gushes forth. Forthwith the whole company fall on the victim with their swords, hacking off pieces of the quivering flesh and devouring them raw, with such wild haste that in the short interval between the rise of the day-star, which marked the hour for the service to begin, and the disappearance of its rays before the rising sun, the entire camel, body and bones, skin, blood and entrails, is wholly devoured.”³⁶⁷

In this case the camel was offered as a sacrifice to Venus or the Morning Star, and it had to be devoured while the star was visible. But it is clear that the camel itself had been originally revered, because except for the sacrifice it was unlawful for the Arabs to kill the camel otherwise than as a last resort to save themselves from starvation. “The ordinary sustenance of the Saracens was derived from pillage or from hunting and from the milk of their herds. Only when these supplies failed they fell back on the flesh of their camels, one of which was slain for each clan or for each group which habitually pitched their tents together—always a fraction of a clan—and the flesh was hastily devoured by the kinsmen in dog-like fashion, half raw and merely softened over the fire.”³⁶⁸ In Bhopāl it is stated that a camel is still sacrificed annually in perpetuation of the ancient rite. Hindus who keep camels revere them like other domestic animals. When one of my tent-camels had broken its leg by a fall and had to be killed, I asked the camelman, to whom the animal belonged, to shoot it; but he positively refused, saying, ‘How shall I kill him who gives me my bread’; and a Muhammadan orderly finally shot it.

16. The joint sacrifice

The camel was devoured raw almost before the life had left the body, so that its divine life and blood might be absorbed by the worshippers. The obligation to devour the whole body perhaps rested on the belief that its slaughter otherwise than as a sacrifice was impious, and if any part of the body was left unconsumed the clan would incur the guilt of murder. Afterwards, when more civilised stomachs revolted against the practice of devouring the whole body, the bones were buried or burnt, and it is suggested that our word bonfire comes from bone-fire.³⁶⁹ Primitive usage required the presence of every clansman, so that each might participate in shedding the sacred blood. Neither the blood of the god nor of any of the kinsmen might be spilt by private violence, but only by consent of the kindred and the kindred god. Similarly in shedding the blood of a member of the kin all the others were required to share the responsibility, and this was the ancient Hebrew form of execution where the culprit was stoned by the whole congregation.³⁷⁰

17. Animal sacrifices in Greece

M. Salomon Reinach gives the following explanation of Greek myths in connection with the sacrificial meal: “The primitive sacrifice of the god, usually accompanied by the eating of the god in fellowship, was preserved in their religious rites, and when its meaning had been forgotten numerous legends were invented to account for it. In order to understand their origin it is necessary to remember that the primitive worshippers masqueraded as the god and took his name. As the object of the totem sacrifice is to make the participants like the god and confer his divinity on them, the faithful endeavoured to increase the resemblance by taking the name of the god and covering themselves with the skins of animals of his species. Thus the Athenian damsels celebrating the worship of the bear Artemis dressed themselves in bear-skins and called themselves bears; the Maenads who sacrificed the doe Penthea were clad in doe-skins. Even in the later rites the devotees of Bacchus called themselves Bacchantes. A whole series of legends can be interpreted as semi-rationalistic explanations of the sacrificial meal. Actaeon was really a great stag sacrificed by women devotees who called themselves the great hind and the little hinds; he became the rash hunter who surprised Artemis at her bath, and was transformed into a stag and devoured by his own dogs. The dogs are a euphemism; in the early legend they were the human devotees of the sacred stag who tore him to pieces and devoured him with their bare teeth. These feasts of raw flesh survived in the secret religious cults of Greece long after uncooked meat had ceased to be consumed in ordinary life. Orpheus (ophreus, the haughty), who appears in art with the skin of a fox on his head, was originally a sacred fox devoured by the women of the fox totem-clan; these women call themselves Bassarides in the legend, and bassareus is one of the old names of the fox. Zagreus is a son of Zeus and Persephone who transformed himself into a bull to escape from the Titans, excited against him by Hera; the Titans, worshippers of the divine bull, killed and ate him; Zagreus was invoked in his worship as the ‘good bull,’ and when Zagreus by the grace of Zeus was reborn as Dionysus, the young god carried on his forehead the horns which bore witness to his animal nature. Hippolytus in the fable is the son of Theseus who repels the advances of Phaedra, his stepmother, and was killed by his runaway horses because Theseus, deceived by Phaedra, invoked the anger of a god upon him. But Hippolytus in Greek means ‘One torn to pieces by horses.’ Hippolytus is himself a horse whom the worshippers of the horse, calling themselves horses and disguised as such, tore to pieces and devoured. Phaethon (The Shining One) is a son of Apollo, who demands leave to drive the chariot of the sun, drives it badly, nearly burns up the world, and finally falls and perishes in the sea. This legend is the product of an old rite at Rhodes, the island of the sun, where every year a white horse and a burning chariot were thrown into the sea to help the sun, fatigued by his labours.”³⁷¹