Clearly, the idea of inter-communion with the gods, on the basis of the inter-flow of blood, exists in many Brahmanic practices of to-day. It still finds its expression in the occasional “Sacrifice of the Yajna, at which a ram is immolated.” It is claimed by the Brahmans that “this sacrifice is the most exalted and the most meritorious of all that human beings can devise. It is the most grateful to the gods. It calls down all sorts of temporal blessings, and blots out all the sins that can have been accumulated for four generations.” The ram chosen for this sacrifice must be “entirely white, and without blemish: of about three years old.” Only Brahmans who are free from physical infirmities and from ceremonial defects can have a part in its offering, “at which no man of any other caste can be present.” Because of the Brahmanic horror of the shedding of blood, the victim is smothered, or “strangled”; after which it is cut in pieces, and burned as an oblation. “A part, however, is preserved for him who presides at the sacrifice, and part for him who is at the expense of it. These share their portions with the Brahmans who are present; amongst whom a scuffle ensues, each striving for a small bit of the flesh. Such morsels as they can catch they tear with their hands, and devour as a sacred viand [the meat of inter-communion with the gods]. This practice is the more remarkable, as being the only occasion in their [the Brahmans’] lives when they can venture to touch animal food.” “This most renowned sacrifice ... is one of the six privileges of the Brahmans”; and it would seem that its offering may now be directed to any one of the divinities, at the preference of the offerer. Formerly there was also the “Great Sacrifice of the Yajna,” which is no longer in use. “At this sacrifice,” in its day, “every species of victim was immolated; and it is beyond doubt that human beings even were offered up; but the horse and the elephant were the most common.”[323] So, there has never been an entire absence from the Brahmanic practices of an inter-communion with the gods through an inter-union by blood.
Even more remarkable than this canonical sacrifice of the Yajna, with its accompanying inter-communion, are some of the occult sacrifices to the gods of the Hindoo Pantheon, in which all the ordinary barriers of caste are disregarded, in the un-canonical but greatly prized services of inter-communion with the gods on the basis of an inter-flow of blood. The offerings of blood-flowing sacrifices, including even the cow, are made before the image of Vishnoo; or, more probably of Krishna as one of the forms of Vishnoo. The spirituous liquors of the country are also presented as drink-offerings. Then follows the inter-communion. “He who administers [at the offering to the god] tastes each species of meat and of liquor; after which he gives permission to the worshipers to consume the rest. Then may be seen men and women rushing forward, tearing and devouring. One seizes a morsel, and while he gnaws it, another snatches it out of his hands, and thus it passes on from mouth to mouth till it disappears, while fresh morsels, in succession, are making the same disgusting round. The meat being greedily eaten up, the strong liquors and the opium [which have all been offered to the gods] are sent round. All drink out of the same cup, one draining what another leaves, in spite of their natural abhorrence of such a practice.... All castes are confounded, and the Brahman is not above the Pariah.... Brahmans, Sudras, Pariahs, men and women, swill the arrack which was the offering to the Saktis, regardless of the same glass being used by them all, which in ordinary cases would excite abhorrence. Here it is a virtuous act to participate in the same morsel, and to receive from each other’s mouths the half-gnawn flesh.”[324]
The fact that this service is of so disgusting a character, does not lessen its importance as an illustration of a primitive custom degraded by successive generations of defiling influences. It still stands as one of the proofs of the universal custom of an attempted inter-communion with the gods through an inter-union by blood. Indeed, there are many traces, in India, of the survival of this primitive idea. Referring to the worship of Krishna, under the form of Jagan-natha (or Juggernaut, as the name is popularly rendered) a recent writer on India says: “Before this monstrous shrine, all distinctions of caste are forgotten, and even a Christian may sit down and eat with a Brahman. In his work on Orissa, Dr. W. W. Hunter, says, that at the ‘Sacrament of the Holy Food’ he has seen a Puri priest receive his food from a Christian’s hand.... This rite is evidently also a survival of Buddhism [It goes a long way back of that]. It is remarkable that at the shrine of Vyankoba, an obscure form of Siva, at Pandharpur, in the Southern Maratha country, caste is also in abeyance, all men being deemed equal in its presence. Food is daily sent as a gift from the god to persons in all parts of the surrounding country, and the proudest Brahman gladly will accept and partake of it from the hands of the Sudra, or Mahar, who is usually its bearer. There are two great annual festivals in honor of Jagan-natha.... They are held everywhere; but at Puri they are attended by pilgrims from every part of India, as many as 200,000 often being present. All the ground is holy within twenty miles of the pagoda, and the establishment of priests amounts to 3000. The ‘Sacrament of the Holy Food’ is celebrated three times a day.”[325]
Thus it is evident that the idea of inter-communion with the gods has not been lost sight of in India, even through the influence of Brahmanism and Booddhism against the idea of divine-human inter-union by blood—which is life. Indeed, this idea so pervades the religious thought of the Hindoos, that the commands are specific in their sacred books, that a portion of all food must be offered to the spirits, before any of it is partaken of by the eater. “It is emphatically declared that he who partakes of food before it has been offered in sacrifice as above described, eats but to his own damnation;”[326] unless he discerns there the principle of divine-human inter-communion, he eats to his own spiritual destruction.[327]
And just here it is well to notice an incidental item of evidence that in India, as in the other lands of the East, the sacrifices to the gods were in some way linked with the primitive rite of human covenanting by blood. An Oriental scholar has called attention to the origin of the nose-ring, so commonly worn in India, as described in the Hindoo Pāga-Vatham.[328] The story runs, that at the incarnation of Vishnoo as Krishna, the holy child’s life was sought, and his mother exchanged her infant for the child of another woman, in order to his protection. In doing so, she “bored a hole in the nose of her infant, and put a ring into it as an impediment and a sign. The blood which came from the wound was as a sacrifice to prevent him from falling into the hand of his enemies.” And, to this day, the nose-ring has two names, indicative of its two-fold purpose. “The first [name] is nate-kaddan, which signifies ‘the obligation or debt a person is under by a vow’; the second [name] is mooka-taddi, literally ‘nose-impediment or hindrance,’ that is, to sickness or death.” The child’s blood is given in covenant obligation to the gods, and the nose-ring is the token of the covenant-obligation, and a pledge of protected life. When a Hindoo youth who has worn a nose-ring would remove it, on the occasion of his marriage, he must do so with formal ceremonies at the temple, and by the use of a liquid “which represents blood,” composed of saffron,[329] of lime, and of water. A young tree must also be planted in connection with this ceremony, as in the ceremony of blood-covenanting in some portions of the East.[330] These symbolisms can hardly fail to be recognized as based on the universal primitive rite of blood-covenanting.[331]
The very earliest records of Babylon and Assyria, indicate the outreaching of man for an inter-union with God, or with the gods, by substitute blood, and the confident inter-communion of man with God, or with the gods, on the strength of this inter-union by blood. There is an Akkadian poem which clearly “goes back to pre-Semitic times,” with its later Assyrian translation, concerning the sacrifice to the gods, of a first-born son.[332] It says distinctly: “His offspring for his life he gave.” Here is obviously the idea of vicarious substitution, of life for life, of the blood of the son for the blood of the father, but this substitution does not necessarily involve the idea of an expiatory offering for sin; even though it does include the idea of propitiation. Abraham’s surrender of his first-born son to God was in proof of his loving trust, not of his sense of a penalty due for sin. Jephthah’s surrender of his daughter was on a vow of devotedness, not as an exhibit of remorse, or of penitence, for unexpiated guilt. In each instance, the outpouring of substitute blood was in evidence of a desire to be in new covenant oneness with God. Thus Queen Manenko and Dr. Livingstone made a covenant of blood vicariously, by the substitution of her husband on the one part, and of an attendant of Livingstone, on the other part.[333] So, also the Akkadian king may have sought a covenant union with his god—from whom sin had separated him—by the substitute blood of his first-born and best loved son.
Certain it is, that the early kings of Babylon and Assyria were accustomed to make their grateful offerings to the gods, and to share those offerings with the gods, by way of inter-communion with the gods, apart from any sense of sin and of its merited punishment which they may have felt.[334] Indeed, it is claimed, with a show of reason, that the very word (surqinu) which was used for “altar” in the Assyrian, was primarily the word for “table”; that, in fact, what was later known as the “altar” to the gods, was originally the table of communion between the gods and their worshipers.[335] There seems to be a reference to this idea in the interchanged use of the words “altar” and “table” by the Prophet Malachi: “And ye say, Wherein have ye despised thy name? Ye offer polluted bread upon mine altar? And ye say, Wherein have ye polluted thee? In that ye say, The table of the Lord is contemptible.”[336] So again, in Isaiah 65 : 11: “But ye that forsake the Lord, that forget my holy mountain, that prepare a table for Fortune, and that fill up mingled wine unto Destiny; I will destine you to the sword, and ye shall all bow down to the slaughter.”
See, in this connection, the Assyrian inscription of Esarhaddon, the son of Sennacherib,[337] in description of his great palace at Nineveh: “I filled with beauties the great palace of my empire, and I called it ‘The Palace which Rivals the World.’ Ashur, Ishtar of Nineveh, and the gods of Assyria, all of them, I feasted within it. Victims precious and beautiful I sacrificed before them, and I caused them to receive my gifts. I did for those gods whatever they wished.”[338] It is even claimed by Assyrian scholars, that in this inter-communion with the gods, worshipers might partake of the flesh of animals which was forbidden to them at all other times[339]—as among the Brahmans of India, to-day.
In farther illustration of the truth, that inter-communion with the gods was shown in partaking of sacred food with the gods, H. Fox Talbot, the Assyriologist, says of the ancient Assyrian inscription: “There is a fine inscription, not yet fully translated, describing the soul in heaven, clothed in a white radiant garment, seated in the company of the blessed, and fed by the gods themselves, with celestial food.”[340]
Among the Parsees, or the Zoroastrians, who intervene, as it were, between the primitive peoples of Assyria and India, and the later inhabitants of the Persian empire, there prevailed the same idea of divine-human inter-union through blood, and of divine-human inter-communion through sharing the flesh of the proffered and accepted sacrifice, at the altar, or at the table, of the gods, Ormuzd and Ahriman. The horse was a favorite substitute victim of sacrifice, among the Parsees; as also among the Hindoos and the Chinese. Its blood was the means of divine-human inter-union. “The flesh of the victim was eaten by the priest and the worshipers; the ‘soul’ [the life, the blood], of it only was enjoyed by Ormazd.”[341] The communion-drink, in the Parsee sacrament, as still observed, is the juice of the haoma, or hom. “Small bread [or wafers] called Darun, of the size of a dollar, and covered with a piece of meat, incense, and Haoma, or Hom,” the juice of the plant known in India as Soma, are used in this sacrament. “The Darun and the Hom [having been presented to the gods] are afterwards eaten by the priests,” as in communion.[342] This is sometimes called the “Sacrament of the Haoma.”[343]