THEORY AND RITUAL OF HUMAN SACRIFICE

The most remarkable of the Man-God-slaying cults which have come under what may be termed scientific observation while actually in force, is that which prevailed till fifty or sixty years ago among the mountaineer Khonds of Orissa. The first observer, Major Macpherson, was a man abnormally qualified in his day both for the study of the sacrificial rite and for its peaceful abolition ; and science owes him on the former head nearly as much as civilisation does on the latter. It would be hard to find an anthropological research before his day more marked by the scientific spirit.

On the face of his report, there are various reasons for regarding the Khonds as a Dravidian race driven to the hills (where they subjugated other aborigines) by invading Oriyas ; and one of several grounds for surmising that their religion derives from ancient Central-Asiatic sources is the fact that, like the Chinese, they show great respect for parents and ancestors. One of their boasts is, or was, " that they reverence their fathers and mothers, while the Hindus treat theirs with contempt." Another reason is their rejection alike of temples and images. " They regard the making, setting-up, and worshipping of images of the Gods as the most signal proof of conscious removal to a hopeless distance from communion with them ; a confession of utter despair of being permitted to make any direct approach to the deity : a sense of debarment which they themselves have never felt." Yet another reason is the fact that they had no official priesthood, the function being open to anyone who felt called to assume it, and went through the normal preliminary symptoms of a state of trance.

Politically they were governed in general by patriarchs, patriarchal councils, and popular assemblies ; and there was no trace of Christian influences the very existence of the tribes having been unknown to the Government before 1885. Their religious system was a normal polytheism, with a Supreme Creator God, known as Boora Pennu or Light God, at the head. Under him were Tari Pennu, the Earth Goddess, and certain second-class deities of natural or social forces, as rain, vegetation, increase, hunting, war, and boundaries. Next came the deified sinless men of the first age, who were the tutelary Gods of tribes and septs ; and under these ranked a multitude of local spirits, all named Gods, who presided over villages, houses, hills, fountains, streams, forests, and so forth. With the second order of Gods was ranked Dinga, the judge of the dead and all otter of retribution, who has some appearance of being taken over from another cult.

It was to Tari, the Earth Goddess, that human sacrifices were offered ; and from the fact that they occurred only among certain tribes, who theoretically admitted the inferiority of Tari to Boora, but gave her their chief devotion and credited her as the Boora-worshippers did Boora with raising fallen man from misery and introducing civilisation, it may be inferred that the cults were originally independent. To the last, the sect of Boora regarded human sacrifice " with the utmost abhorrence as the con- summation of human guilt, and believed it to have been adopted under monstrous delusions devised by Tari as the mother of falsehood, with a view solely to the final destruction of her followers." It is told of Boora, too, that he interfered, through a minor God, to substitute a buffalo for a man as an oblation to Tari.

The common relationship of exogamous tribes, who are constantly at war yet habitually intermarry, is the apparent explanation of such a permanent schism. But it seems not impossible that the sacrificial cult was originally that of a conquered race ; and that a section of the Khonds adopted it from them, as so often happens where a primitive rite or mystery practised by aborigines is able to appeal to later comers. It was from an apparently subject race who participated in the cult that the Tari-worshipping Khonds purchased their human victims.

As normally practised, the rite was not totemistic, but of the nature of "sympathetic magic," and the purpose was to promote agricultural fertility ; but it was also resorted to as a special means of propitiation in the case of a pestilence or other sign of divine displeasure, such as a calamity in the family of a chief ; and individual families similarly made propitiation for individual disaster. The victim, called the meriah, or tokki, or keddi, was in all cases either purchased from the procuring caste (who at times kidnapped children from the plains for the purpose) or bred as a hereditary victim, a number of families being- set apart and cherished for the purpose, so that he or she, for it was often a woman was either personally willing to be slain on religious grounds or was the property of the sacrificers. As it was the universal conviction that the meriah became a God by the act of sacrifice, there was no difficulty in keeping up the supply ; and in times of famine Khonds would sell their own children as victims, con- sidering the sacrificial death a highly honourable one.

The special religio-ethical feature of the rite was the universally accepted doctrine that the victim must be " bought with a price," and died " for all mankind," not merely for the Khonds ; and this view was set forth in the ritual, though it also expressed distinctly the local demand for greater wealth. An odd feature of it was that, although the flesh of the slain victim was cut up into shreds so that a piece might be buried in every field, the recited myth told that Tari demanded blood because when the earth was soft mud she made it firm by the blood she dropped when she cut her finger. And there was put in her mouth the injunction : " Behold the good change ! cut up my body to complete it."* It thus appears that originally the victim had represented the Earth Goddess herself ; and it may be that the pretence of drying up the soft mud was a magical device to put the evil spirits of drought on a false scent.

The sacrificial rite lasted three or five days. On the first, the meriah' s hair, previously kept long, was shaved off save in cases where it had been shorn ten or twelve days before and the people passed the night in a licentious revel. On the second, he was carefully bathed and newly clothed, taken in procession to the sacred (and taboo) Meriah grove, where he was fastened to a stake, seated, and anointed with ghee, oil, and turmeric (red dye), decorated with flowers, and worshipped during the day by the assembly, who again spent the night in debauchery. On the third day he was given milk to drink, and the final act of ritual and sacrifice began. At this stage we are struck by the importance of the priest : "a great and fitly instructed priest alone can officiate "; and it is to be gathered from the accounts of the Jauni, as well as from the ritual, (1) that he was traditionally a celibate and recluse, parading his auterities and securing sanctity by personal uncleanness ; (2) that it was primarily his function to brave the curse of the sacrificed and deified victim ; and (3) that it was thus the priestly influence that maintained the sacrifice. Four days after the sacrifice of the meriah there was sacrificed a buffalo, of which the remains were left for the meriah's spirit apparently a surrogate for the human sacrifice, which on this view had been re-established after having been abandoned. The ritual, however, was so framed as to distribute the respon- sibility over the village headman or patriarch and the body of the people. On the one hand, the victim reproached his slayers while avowing the belief that he was made a God by the act ; on the other hand, the priest and the headman, pleading this, defended themselves by reciting the cir- cumstances under which he was purchased and dedicated, he consenting as a child. The idea seems to have been to set forth thoroughly both points of view, so that there should be no misunderstanding about the religious nature of the act, and the responsibility of the entire community for it ; but whether by way of sympathetic imagination on the part of some ritual-making priest, or by simple adoption of the actual language of some past sufferer, the victim in one form of the ritual was made to invoke a curse upon the priest, while the latter declared that it was he, as minister of the Creator God, who gave the death its virtue, and threatened to deprive the resisting one of a place among the Gods.  Finally, he was placed in the cleft or split made in a long branch of a green tree, which was made to grasp his neck or chest, the open ends being closed and tightly tied so as to imprison him in the wood, and make as it were a cross, of which he was the upright ; and it appears to have been at this stage that there occurred one of the most significant acts in the entire ritual. It being essential that the victim should finally not resist, his arms and legs, or, where the arms were sufficiently secured, the legs only, were broken, save in cases where the end was attained by drugging him with opium or datura. This accomplished, the priest slightly wounded the victim with an axe, and the crowd instantly cut him to pieces, leaving untouched the head and intestines. These, after being carefully watched in the interim, were next day, in some cases, burned to ashes with a whole sheep ; and the ashes were spread over the fields, or laid as a paste over the houses and granaries. In the same spirit, the portions of flesh were solemnly carried to the participating villages, religiously divided among the people, and buried in the fields, each man placing his piece in the earth "behind his back without looking."

Upon this ritual there were many local variations. Major-General Campbell, who had followed Macpherson in the Khond agency, tells of a form of the rite in which the victim was first drugged, then taken to the place of execution, where his head and neck were placed in the cleft of a strong split-bamboo, the ends of which were secured and held ; whereafter the priest with his axe broke the joints of the legs and arms, and the sacrifice was con- summated by the people in the usual frightful way. In yet other cases, according to M. Elie Reclus, the two methods of preventing the victim's struggles were combined. " She must not die in her bonds, since she dies voluntarily, of her own freewill, as they say. He [the priest] loosens her from the stake, stupefies her by making her gulp down a portion of opium and datura, then breaks her elbows and knees with the back of the hatchet." Other variations are noted in the use of the drug ; and in different districts the entire sacrifice varied. Thus among the Kotaya hill tribes the victim was taken before the image of the Earth Goddess, and rice, coloured (red) with turmeric, was thrown on his hair, while he was kept under the influence of opium. In this case the victim had enjoyed special privileges for an unspecified period, all his wishes being granted, and every woman in the village being at his command as a concubine. No quasi-crucifixion is specified, the victim being simply stabbed "in the stomach," and the blood used to bathe the idol, whereafter he was cut to pieces by the crowd. In yet another case (at Kamgherry and Lutchampore) the victim was placed in irons, new clothed, made drunk with arrack, and forced into the "temple" of the Goddess, a hole three feet deep. There his throat was cut and his head cut off ; the remains being covered with earth and with a pile of stones. When the next victim was to be sacrificed, the hole was cleared out afresh for the purpose.

In this district occurred yet another variation. Every third year two victims were sacrificed in honour of the Goddess ; and, whether thus triennially or annually, at Bundair in Jeypore there were sacrificed to the Sun-God at one festival three victims, " one at the east, one at the west, and the third in the centre of the village." In this case each victim was tied by the hajr to a post near his grave, over which he was suspended horizontally with the face downwards, his legs and arms being held outstretched by the assistants. He was then beheaded, and the head, on the stake, was there left to decay. A further variation was in the direction of the principle that the infliction of pain made the sacrifice specially efficacious. In some districts the victim, after being exposed on a couch, and led in procession round the place of sacrifice, was put to death by slow burning, or by applying hot brands to the body on a sloping pyre, and tortured as long as possible, " it being believed that the favour of the Earth Goddess, especially in respect of the supply of rain, will be in proportion to the quantity of tears which may be extracted." It is needless to recapitulate the further variants at any length. "Victims were stoned, beaten to death with tomahawks or heavy iron rings ; they were strangled ; they were crushed between two planks ; they were drowned in a pool in the jungle, or in a trough filled with pig's blood. Sometimes the victim was slowly roasted ; sometimes he was despatched by a blow to the heart, and the priest plunged a wooden image into the gaping wound, that the mannikin might be gorged with blood. All that is constant is the principle of a redemptory bloody sacrifice. But by way of synopsis it may be noted that there prevail certain principles of procedure and symbolism, especially (1) that of stupefying or laming the victim to secure apparent acquiescence ; (2) the counter- principle of the need either for suffering as such or for such suffering as shall cause the victim to weep much a con- ception belonging to sympathetic magic ; (3) the anointing, and the consequent sanctification of the oil ; (4) the deification of the victim ; (5) the according to him of remarkable  privileges, sexual and social ; and (6) a certain propensity to the symbol of the cross. The use of an intoxicating drug, it should be added, is again specified in the case of the old sacrifice of a youth by the Brahman tribe called Karhada to the Sakti Goddess. It need hardly be added that human sacrifices were at one time fairly common in India among the Aryan as well as the Dravidian races the Khonds went about freely, in some cases at least the adult victim was kept fettered, though well fed, in the house of the village patriarch.

Written by John M. Robertson in "Pagan Christies - Studies in Comparative Hierology", Watt & Co., London, 1903, excepts 106-114. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.