1876.] Eajendralala Mitra— On Human Sacrifices in Ancieni India. Ill 



But whether so or not, certain it is that at one time or other men were 

 immolated for the gratification of some divinity or other in this rite 

 or its prototype. The question then arises, was it the case before the date 

 of the Bik Sanhita, or after it ? 



The interval between the date of the S'atapatha Brahmana and the 

 Sanhita of the Eig Veda is estimated by the learned Professor Max Miiller 

 at about six and seven hundred years, and the question being, when was the 

 sacrifice real which became emblematic in the time of the S'atapatha ? it 

 would require more confidence in one's power of conjecture than I can 

 pretend to, to say that it must have been before the time of the Sanhita, 

 and not after it. National rites, customs, and ceremonies are, doubtless, 

 very tenacious of life, but in primitive times, in the infancy and early 

 youth of society, the characteristics of social life changed much more rapidly 

 than in later times ; certain it is, that the social condition of the Indo- 

 Aryans and their rites and ceremonies underwent radical and most extensive 

 changes during the interval between the Eik Sanhita and the S'atapatha 

 Brahmana, and there is literally not an iota of evidence to show that the 

 rite of Purushamedha was left unaltered for the whole period. Seeing 

 that the Brahmana depends solely on the Sanhita for scriptural authority, 

 and adapts the, to us, indistinct and vague generalities of the original, for 

 the developement of a new cultus, modifying and changing details to suit 

 its own views, the presumption becomes strong that the real sacrifice be- 

 longed to the Sanhita, and the Brahmana divested it of its hideousness and 

 cruelty, and made it emblematic, even as the Vaishnavas have, within the 

 last five or six hundred years, replaced the sacrifice of goats and buffaloes 

 to Chandika by that of pumpkins and sugarcane. 



Nor is the Purushamedha the only sacrifice at which human sacrifices 

 were ordained. The Asvamedha, or horse sacrifice, required the immolation 

 of a human being just as much as the former, and hence it is that the horse 

 sacrifice was prohibited in the Kali Yuga along with it. The Taittiriya Brah- 

 mana of the Black Yajur Veda gives the following story on the subject : 

 " Prajapati, having created all living beings, through affection entered within 

 them. But afterwards he could not get out of them. He said, ' Whoever 

 will extricate me from this confinement will become wealthy.' The Devas 

 performed an Asvamedha and thereby extricated him ; thus they became 

 wealthy. Whoever performs an Asvamedha attains profusion of wealth by 

 extricating Prajapati."* 





