bear sacrificed to the gods; to be compared is the interesting dispute between mind and speech (ib. 5. 8).  As dependent as is man on what is given by the gods, so dependent are the gods on what is offered to them by men (T[=a]itt.  Br. II. 2. 7. 3; Cat.  Br. I. 2. 5. 24).  Even the gods are now not native to heaven.  They win heaven by sacrifice, by metres, etc. (Cat.  Br. IV. 3. 2. 5).

What, then, is the sacrifice?  A means to enter into the godhead of the gods, and even to control the gods; a ceremony where every word was pregnant with consequences;[16] every movement momentous.  There are indications, however, that the priests themselves understood that much in the ceremonial was pure hocus-pocus, and not of such importance as it was reputed to be.  But such faint traces as survive of a freer spirit objecting to ceremonial absurdities only mark more clearly the level plain of unintelligent superstition which was the feeding-ground of the ordinary priests.

Some of the cases of revolted common-sense are worth citing.  Conspicuous as an authority on the sacrifice, and at the same time as a somewhat recalcitrant priest, is Y[=a]j[.n]avalkya, author and critic, one of the greatest names in Hindu ecclesiastical history.  It was he who, apropos of the new rule in ethics, so strongly insisted upon after the Vedic age and already beginning to obtain, the rule that no one should eat the flesh of the (sacred) cow (’Let no one eat beef....  Whoever eats it would be reborn (on earth) as a man of ill fame’) said bluntly:  ’As for me I eat (beef) if it is good (firm).[17] It certainly required courage to say this, with the especial warning against beef, the meat of an animal peculiarly holy (Cat.  Br. III.  I. 2. 21).  It was, again, Y[=a]jnavalkya (Cat.  Br., I. 3.  I. 26), who protested against the priests’ new demand that the benefit of the sacrifice should accrue in part to the priest; whereas it had previously been understood that not the sacrificial priest but the sacrificer (the worshipper, the man who hired the priest and paid the expenses) got all the benefit of the ceremony.  Against the priests’ novel and unjustifiable claim Y[=a]jnavalkya exclaims:  ’How can people have faith in this?  Whatever be the blessing for which the priests pray, this blessing is for the worshipper (sacrificer) alone.[18] It was Y[=a]jnavalkya, too, who rebutted some new superstition involving the sacrificer’s wife, with the sneer, ‘who cares whether the wife,’ etc. (kas tad [=a]driyeta, ib. 21).  These protestations are naively recorded, though it is once suggested that in some of his utterances Y[=a]jnavalkya was not in earnest (ib. IV. 2. 1. 7).  The high mind of this great priest is contrasted with the mundane views of his contemporaries in the prayers of himself and of another priest; for it is recorded that whereas Y[=a]jnavalkya’s prayer to the Sun was ’give me light’ (or ‘glory,’ varco me dehi), that