Animal Sacrifice

The practice of animal sacrifice can be
found in two different strands of the
Hindu tradition. The first, and by far the
earliest, is in the cult of sacrifice described
in the later strata of the Vedas, particularly
in the Brahmana literature. The cost of
these rites virtually ensured that they
could only be performed by royalty and
nobility, since some entailed the slaughter
of hundreds of animals.
Perhaps the most famous of these rites
was the horse sacrifice (ashvamedha),
which served to prove a king’s great power.
In the early centuries before the common
era, these sacrifices grew less frequent—a
trend often connected to the stress on
ahimsa by the Buddhists and Jains, two
groups that opposed the slaughter of any
life—and by the early centuries of the
common era, even Hindu commentators
denounced the Vedic sacrifices because
they entailed animal slaughter. In modern
times, these rites have largely fallen into
disuse, and even when they have been
revived and re-created, they usually do not
involve animal slaughter but substitutions
of some sort, such as vegetables or fruits.
The other context in which animal sacrifice can be found, and is still performed
quite regularly, is in the worship of village
deities, or certain powerful and terrifying
forms of the Goddess. In this worship the
animals (usually goats) are decapitated,
and the blood is offered to the deity, often
by smearing some of it on a post outside of
the temple.
In Hindu culture, blood is considered
a “hot” substance—highly impure,
extremely powerful, and readily contaminating other things. Any deity that
requires sacrifice is also “hot”—powerful
enough to grant favors to their devotees
(bhakta), but also marginal, potentially
dangerous, and requiring frequent animal
sacrifice to maintain their power.
The most extreme example is at the
temple of the goddess Kamakhya in
modern Assam, a region located in
northeastern India. This is one of the few
reported instances of human sacrifice,
although the custom was halted by the
British in 1832. When Kamakhya’s present
temple was consecrated in 1565, she was
supposedly offered the heads of 140 men,
all of whom had volunteered themselves
as offerings.
Although such blood-drinking deities
are often very powerful, many Hindus do
not approve of the impurity (ashaucha)
and slaughter connected with animal sacrifice. For this reason, one of the first ways
to make a particular deity acceptable to a
more cultured public is often to make the
sacrifices vegetarian, by substituting a
gourd or cucumber in place of the sacrificial animal.