KIRAN ATMA: animal sacrifice

Showing posts with label animal sacrifice. Show all posts

Hinduism - What Are Village Deities?

According to popular Hindu tradition, the universe has 330 million gods.

The richness of this mythic imagination can be seen in the composition of the Hindu pantheon, in which hundreds of major and minor deities have been given form, identity, and mythic history.

Yet aside from these deities, who have been given an identifiable form, there are also a host of village deities found throughout India.

In most cases, the village deity is exactly that—the deity who protects, watches over, and acts as a divine over seer for a particular village or locale.

One of their most common functions is to protect the village from disease, either of people or livestock, and to provide remedies when disease strikes.

They are also the guardians of the village, defending it from ghosts and unseen powers, as well as protecting the villagers from danger and misfortune.

The authority of these deities is generally quite limited—in most cases, it does not extend beyond the village itself.

In most cases, village deities have no well defined mythic history, form, or personality.

At times they will have a temple dedicated to them, but in other cases the village deity is believed to be associated with a particular tree or is represented by a post in the village square.

Village deities are usually nonvegetarian, demanding animal sacrifices and offerings of blood in exchange for their services.

Relationships with these deities are highly pragmatic—the villagers make offerings, and the deities protect, but beyond these offerings there is usually little organized worship.

If these deities have any organized priesthood, it is almost always non-brahmin because the impurity (ashaucha) generated by animal sacrifices would be unacceptable to brahmins.

These priesthoods are intermediaries between the deity and the villagers, usually communicating with the deities through dreams or possession.

In this way the deities’ wishes become known, and problems or concerns can find their solution.

In some cases, local deities have gained greater stature and have been assimilated into the pantheon.

For female deities, this process is fairly simple, since they can be brought into the pantheon by claiming that their temples are one of the Shakti Pithas, a network of sites sacred to the Goddess that spreads throughout the subcontinent.

Each Shakti Pitha marks the site where a body part of the dismembered goddess Sati fell to earth, taking form there as a different goddess; all these individual goddesses are thus seen as manifestations of a single great Goddess.

Male deities are more typically incorporated into the pantheon as incarnations of the deity Vishnu, and three major instances of the former are Jagannath, Vithoba, and Venkateshvara.

Village deities are less usually considered to be avatars of the god Shiva, although this has occurred with Khandoba, an important regional deity in the state of Maharashtra.

Hinduism And Hindu Theology - Historic Perceptions And Changing Attitude Towards Animal Sacrifice

Sacrifice of an animal or ritual Animal sacrifice has been practiced historically in two distinct strands of Hinduism.

1. The first, and by far the most ancient, is the sacrificial religion detailed in the Vedas' later layers, especially in Brahmana literature.

Because some of these rituals required the killing of hundreds of animals, they could practically only be conducted by royalty and aristocracy.

The horse sacrifice (ashvamedha), which intended to demonstrate a king's tremendous might, was perhaps the most renowned of these rituals.

These sacrifices became less common in the early centuries before the common era—a trend that was often linked to Buddhist and Jains' emphasis on ahimsa, or nonviolence—and by the early centuries of the common era, even Hindu commentators were condemning the Vedic sacrifices because they involved animal slaughter.

These rituals have generally gone out of favor in contemporary times, and even when they are resurrected and re-created, they typically do not include animal killing but rather substitutes such as vegetables or fruits.

2. The worship of village deities, or particularly strong and frightening manifestations of the Goddess, is another setting in which animal sacrifice may be found and is still practiced on a regular basis.

Animals (typically goats) are beheaded in this form of devotion, and the blood is given to the god, sometimes by smearing part of it on a post outside the temple.

Blood is regarded a "hot" material in Hindu culture, since it is very polluted, tremendously strong, and easily contaminates other things.

Any god who needs animal sacrifice is also “hot”—powerful enough to bestow blessings on their followers (bhakta), but also marginal, possibly dangerous, and needing regular animal sacrifice to sustain their power.

The temple of the goddess Kamakhya in contemporary Assam, a province in northeastern India, is the most severe example.

Although the practice was outlawed by the British in 1832, this is one of the few documented cases of human sacrifice.

When Kamakhya's current temple was dedicated in 1565, she was said to have been given the heads of 140 men who had all agreed to be sacrificed.

Many Hindus do not agree of the impurity (ashaucha) and murder associated with animal sacrifice, despite the fact that such blood-drinking deities are frequently extremely powerful.

As a result, one of the first steps in making a god acceptable to a more educated audience is to make the sacrifices vegetarian by replacing the sacrificial animal with a gourd or cucumber.

You may also want to read more about Hinduism here.

Be sure to check out my writings on religion here.