The rite of sacrifice, which in the simple form of an offering supposed to be agreeable to the deity is the principal ceremony in the early stages of most religions, persists in their later stages but gives rise to clouds of theory and mystical interpretations. Thus in Christianity, the Jewish sacrifices are regarded as prototypes of the death of Christ and that death itself as a sacrifice to the Almighty, an offering of himself to himself, which in some way acts as an expiation for the sins of the world. And by a further development the sacrifice of the mass, that is, the offering of portions of bread and wine which are held to be miraculously transformed into the body and blood of Christ by the manipulations of a qualified priest, is believed to repeat every day the tragedy of Calvary.
The prevalence of this view in Europe should make us chary of stigmatizing Hindu ideas about sacrifice as mental aberrations. They represent the fancies of acute intellects dealing with ancient ceremonies which they cannot abandon but which they transform into something more congenial to their own transitional mode of thought.
Though the BrâhmaGas and Upanishads mix up ritual with physical and metaphysical theories in the most extraordinary fashion, their main motive deserves sympathy and respect. Their weakness lies in their inability to detach themselves (as the Buddha succeeded in doing) from a ritual which though elaborate was neither edifying nor artistic: they seem unable to see the great problems of existence except through the mists of altar smoke. Their merit is their evident conviction that this formalism is inadequate. Their wish is not to distort and cramp nature by bringing it within the limits of the ritual, but to enlarge and expand the ritual until it becomes cosmic.
If they regard the whole universe as one long act of prayer and sacrifice, the idea is grandiose rather than pedantic, though the details may not always be to our taste. And the Upanishads pass from ritual and theology to real speculation in a way unknown to Christian thought.
We are told that the gods obtained immortality and heaven by sacrifice, that they created the universe by sacrifice, that Prajâpati, the creator, is the sacrifice. Although some writers are disposed to distinguish magic sharply from religion, the two are not separated in the Vedas. Sacrifice is not merely a means of pleasing the gods: it is a system of authorized magic or sacred science controlling all worlds, if properly understood. It is a mysterious cosmic force like electricity which can be utilized by a properly trained priest but is dangerous in unskilful hands, for the rites, if wrongly performed, bring disaster or even death on bunglers.
Though the Vedic sacrifices fell more and more out of general use, this notion of the power of rites and formulae did not fade with them but has deeply infected modern Hinduism and even Buddhism, in both of which the lore of spells and gestures assumes monstrous proportions. The Vedic and modern tantric rituals are different but they are based on the same supposition that the universe (including the gods which are part of it) is regulated by some permeating principle, and that this principle can be apprehended by sacred science and controlled by the use of proper methods. So far as these systems express the idea that the human mind can grasp the universe by knowledge, they offer an example of the bold sweep of the Hindu intellect, but the methods prescribed are often fatuous.
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