Fields of Blood Page 6

  Early one morning in about 1200 BCE, an Avestan-speaking priest in the Caucasian steppes went to the river to collect water for the morning sacrifice. There he had a vision of Ahura Mazda, “Lord Wisdom,” one of the greatest gods in the Aryan pantheon. Zoroaster had been horrified by the cruelty of the Sanskrit-speaking cattle raiders, who had vandalized one Avestan community after another. As he meditated on this crisis, the logic of the perennial philosophy led him to conclude that these earthly battles must have a heavenly counterpart. The most important daevas—Varuna, Mithra, and Mazda, who had the honorary title ahura (“Lord”)—were guardians of cosmic order and stood for truth, justice, and respect for life and property. But the cattle raiders’ hero was the war-god Indra, a second-ranking daeva. Perhaps, Zoroaster reflected, the peace-loving ahuras were being attacked in the heavenly world by the wicked daevas. In his vision, Ahura Mazda told him that he was correct and must mobilize his people in a holy war against terror. Good men and women must no longer sacrifice to Indra and the lower daevas but worship the Wise Lord and his fellow ahuras instead; the daevas and the cattle raiders, their earthly henchmen, must be destroyed.104

  We shall see again and again that the experience of an unusual level of violence would often shock its victims into a dualistic vision that splits the world into two irreconcilable camps. Zoroaster concluded that there must be a malevolent deity, Angra Mainyu, the “Hostile Spirit,” who was equal in power to the Wise Lord but was his polar opposite. Every single man, woman, and child, therefore, must choose between absolute Good and absolute Evil.105 The Wise Lord’s followers must live patient, disciplined lives, bravely defending all good creatures from the assault of evildoers, caring for the poor and weak, and tending their cattle kindly instead of driving them from their pastures like the cruel raiders. They must pray five times a day and meditate on the menace of evil in order to weaken its power.106 Society must not be dominated by these fighters (nar-) but by men (viras) who were kind and dedicated to the supreme virtue of truth.107

  So traumatized was Zoroaster by the ferocity of the raiders’ attacks, though, that this gentle, ethical vision was itself permeated with violence. He was convinced that the whole world was rushing toward a final cataclysm in which the Wise Lord would annihilate the wicked daevas and incinerate the Hostile Spirit in a river of fire. There would be a Great Judgment, and the daevas’ earthly followers would be exterminated. The earth would then be restored to its original perfection. There would be no more death and disease, and the mountains and valleys would be leveled to form a great plain where gods and humans could live together in peace.108

  Zoroaster’s apocalyptic thinking was unique and unprecedented. As we have seen, traditional Aryan ideology had long acknowledged the disturbing ambiguity of the violence that lay at the heart of human society. Indra may have been a “sinner,” but his struggles against the forces of chaos—however tainted by the lies and deceitful practices to which he had to resort—had contributed as much to the cosmic order as the work of the great ahuras. Yet by projecting all the cruelty of his time onto Indra, Zoroaster demonized violence and made him a figure of absolute evil.109 Zoroaster made few converts in his lifetime: no community could survive in the steppes without the fighters whom he had rejected. The early history of Zoroastrianism remains obscure, but we do know that when the Avestan Aryans migrated to Iran, they took their faith with them. Suitably adapted to the needs of the aristocracy, Zoroastrianism would become the ideology of the Persian ruling class, and Zoroastrian ideals would infiltrate the religion of Jews and Christians living under Persian rule. But that lay in the distant future. In the meantime, the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans began to bring the cult of Indra to the Indian subcontinent.

  a In Avestan, the Sanskrit devas became daevas.

  2

  India: The Noble Path

  For the Aryans who migrated to the Indian subcontinent, springtime was the season of yoga. After a winter of “settled peace” (ksema) in the encampment, it was time to summon Indra to lead them on the warpath into battle once again, and the priests performed a ceremony that reenacted the god’s miraculous birth.1 They also chanted a hymn celebrating his cosmic victory over the chaos dragon Vritra, who had imprisoned the life-giving waters in the primal mountain so that the world was no longer habitable. During this heroic battle, Indra had been strengthened by hymns sung by the Maruts, the storm gods.2 Now priests chanted these same hymns to fortify the Aryan warriors, who like Indra before his battles drank a draught of soma. At one now with Indra, exalted by the intoxicating liquor, they harnessed their horses to their war chariots in the formalized yug (“yoking”) ritual and set off to raid the villages of their neighbors, firm now in their conviction that they too were setting the world to rights. The Aryans regarded themselves as “noble,” and yoga marked the start of the raiding season, when they really lived up to their name.

  As for the pastoralists of the Near East, Indian Aryan ritual and mythology glorified organized theft and violence. For the Indo-Aryans too, cattle rustling needed no justification; like any aristocrats, they regarded forcible seizure as the only noble way to obtain goods, so raiding was per se a sacred activity. In their battles they experienced an ecstasy that gave meaning and intensity to their lives, performing thus a “religious” as well as an economic and political function. But the word yoga, which has such different connotations for us today, alerts us to a curious dynamic: in India, Aryan priests, sages, and mystics would frequently use the mythology and rhetoric of warfare to subvert the warrior ethos. No myth ever had a single, definitive meaning; rather, it was constantly recast and its meaning changed. The same stories, rituals, and set of symbols that could be used to advocate an ethic of war could also advocate an ethic of peace. By meditating on the violent mythology and rituals that shaped their worldview, the people of India would work as energetically to create a noble path of nonviolence (ahimsa) as their ancestors had promoted the sanctity of the warpath.

  But that dramatic reversal would not begin until almost a millennium after the first Aryan settlers arrived in the Punjab during the nineteenth century BCE. There was no dramatic invasion; they arrived in small groups, gradually infiltrating the region over a very long period.3 During their travels, they would have seen the ruins of a great civilization in the Indus Valley, which at the height of its power (c. 2300–2000 BCE) had been larger than either Egypt or Sumer, but they made no attempt to rebuild these cities, because like all pastoralists, they despised the security of settled life. A rough, hard-drinking people, Aryans earned their living by stealing the herds of rival Aryan tribes and fighting the indigenous peoples, the dasas (“barbarians”).4 Because their agricultural skills were rudimentary, they could support themselves only by cattle raiding and plunder. They owned no territory but let their animals graze on other people’s lands. Driving relentlessly eastward in search of new pastures, they would not wholly abandon this peripatetic life until the sixth century BCE. Continually on the move, living in temporary encampments, they left no archaeological record. For this early period, therefore, we are entirely dependent on ritual texts that were transmitted orally and that allude, in veiled, riddling fashion, to the mythology that the Aryans used to give shape and significance to their lives.

  In c. 1200 a group of learned Aryan families began the monumental task of collecting the hymns that had been revealed to the great seers (rishis) of old, adding new poems of their own. This anthology of more than a thousand poems, divided into ten books, would become the Rig Veda, the most sacred of four Sanskrit texts known collectively as Veda (“knowledge”). Some of these hymns were sung during the Aryans’ sacrificial rituals to the accompaniment of traditional mimes and gestures. Sound would always have sacred significance in India, and as the musical chant and the enigmatic words stole into their minds, Aryans felt in touch with the mysterious potency that held the disparate elements of the universe together in a cosmic coherence. The Rig Veda was rita, divine order, translated into human spe
ech.5 But to a modern reader these texts do not seem at all “religious.” Instead of personal devotion, they celebrate the glory of battle, the joy of killing, the exhilaration of strong drink, and the nobility of stealing other people’s cattle.

  Sacrifice was essential to any ancient economy. The wealth of society was thought to depend on gifts bestowed by the gods who were its patrons. Humans responded to this divine generosity by giving thanks, thus enhancing the gods’ honor and ensuring further benefaction. So Vedic ritual was based on the principle of reciprocal exchange: do ut des—“I give to make you give.” The priests would offer the choicest portions of the sacrificial animal to the gods, which were transferred to the heavenly world by Agni, the sacred fire, while the leftover meat was the gods’ gift to the community. After a successful raid, warriors would distribute their spoils in the vidatha ritual, which resembled the potlatch of the northwestern Native Americans.6 This too was not what we would call a spiritual affair. The chieftain (raja) hosting the sacrifice proudly exhibited the cattle, horses, soma, and crops he had seized to the elders of his own clan and to neighboring rajas. Some of these goods were sacrificed to the gods, others were presented to the visiting chieftains, and the rest were consumed in a riotous banquet. Participants were either drunk or pleasantly mellow; there was casual sex with slave girls and aggressively competitive chariot races, shooting matches, and tugs-of-war; there were dice games for high stakes and mock battles. This was not just a glorified party, however. It was essential to the Aryan economy: a ritualized way of redistributing newly acquired resources with reasonable equity and imposing an obligation on other clans to reciprocate. These sacred contests also trained young men in military skills and helped rajas identify talent, so that an aristocracy of the best warriors could emerge.

  It was not easy to train a warrior to put himself in harm’s way day after day. Ritual gave meaning to an essentially grim and dangerous struggle. The soma dulled inhibitions, and the hymns reminded warriors that by fighting indigenous peoples, they were continuing Indra’s mighty battles for cosmic order. It was said that Vritra had been “the worst of the Vratras,” the native warrior tribes who lurked menacingly on the fringes of Vedic society.7 The Aryans of India shared Zoroaster’s belief that an immense struggle was raging in heaven between the warlike devas and the peace-loving asuras.a But unlike Zoroaster, they rather despised the sedentary asuras and were staunchly on the side of the noble devas, “who drove their chariots, while the asuras stayed at home in their halls.”8 Such was their hatred of the tedium and triviality of settled life that only in their marauding did they feel fully alive. They were, so to speak, spiritually programmed: the constantly repeated ritual gestures imprinted in their bodies and minds an instinctive knowledge of how an alpha male should comport himself; and the emotive hymns implanted a deep-rooted sense of entitlement, an entrenched belief that Aryans were born to dominate.9 All this gave them the courage, tenacity, and energy to traverse the vast distances of northwestern India, eliminating every obstacle in their path.10

  We know practically nothing about Aryan life during this period, yet because mythology is not wholly about the heavenly world but essentially about the here and now, in these Vedic texts we catch glimpses of a community fighting for its life. The mythical battles—between devas and asuras and Indra and his cosmic dragons—reflected the wars between Aryans and dasas.11 The Aryans experienced the Punjab as confinement and the dasas as perverse adversaries who were preventing them from attaining the wealth and open spaces that were their due.12 This emotion ran through many of their stories. They imagined Vritra as a huge snake, coiled around the cosmic mountain and squeezing it so tightly that the waters could not escape.13 Another story spoke of the demon Vala, who had incarcerated the sun together with a herd of cows in a cave so that without light, warmth, or food, the world was unviable. But after chanting a hymn beside the sacred fire, Indra had smashed into the mountain, liberated the cows, and set the sun high in the sky.14 The names Vritra and Vala both derived from the Indo-European root *vr, “to obstruct, enclose, encircle,” and one of Indra’s titles was Vrtrahan (“beating the resistance”).15 It was for the Aryans to fight their way through their encircling enemies as Indra had done. Liberation (moksha) would be another symbol that later generations would reinterpret; its opposite was amhas (“captivity”), cognate with the English anxiety and the German Angst, evoking a claustrophobic distress.16 Later sages would conclude that the path to moksha lay in the realization that less is more.

  By the tenth century, the Aryans had reached the Doab, between the Yamuna and the Ganges Rivers. There they established two small kingdoms, one founded by the confederation of the Kuru and Panchala clans, the other by the Yadava. Every year when the weather was cooler, the Kuru-Panchala dispatched warriors to establish a new Aryan outpost a little farther to the east, where they would subjugate the local populations, raid their farms, and seize their cattle.17 Before they could settle in this region, the dense tropical forests had to be cleared by fire, so Agni became the colonists’ divine alter ego in this incremental drive eastward and the inspiration of the Agnicayana, the ritualized battle that consecrated the new colony. First, the fully armed warriors processed to the riverbank to collect clay to build a brick fire-altar, a provocative assertion of their right to this territory, fighting any locals who stood in their way. The colony became a reality only when Agni leaped forth on the new altar.18 These blazing altars distinguished Aryan encampments from the darkness of the barbarian villages. The settlers also used Agni to lure away their neighbors’ cattle, which would follow the flames. “He should take brightly burning fire to the settlement of his rival,” says a later text. “He thereby takes his wealth, his property.”19 Agni symbolized the warrior’s courage and dominance, his most fundamental and divine “self” (atman).20

  Yet like Indra, his other alter ego, the warrior was tainted. It was said that Indra had committed three sins that had fatally weakened him: he had killed a Brahmin priest, broken a pact of friendship with Vritra, and seduced another man’s wife by disguising himself as her husband; he had thus, progressively, forfeited his spiritual majesty (tejas), his physical strength (bala), and his beauty.21 This mythical disintegration now paralleled a profound change in Aryan society during which Indra and Agni would become inadequate expressions of divinity to some of the rishis. It was the first step in a long process that would undermine the Aryans’ addiction to violence.

  We do not know exactly how the Aryans established their two kingdoms in the Doab, the “Land of the Arya,” but they can only have done so by force. Events may well have conformed to what social historians call the “conquest theory” of state establishment.22 Peasants have much to lose from warfare, which destroys their crops and kills their livestock. When the economically poorer but militarily superior Aryans attacked them, it is possible that, rather than suffer this devastation, some of the more pragmatic peasants decided to submit to the raiders and offer them part of their surplus instead. For their part, the raiders learned not to kill the goose that lays the golden egg, since they could acquire a steady income by returning to the village to demand more goods. Over time this robbery may have been institutionalized to become regular tribute. Once the Yadavas and Kuru-Panchalas subjugated enough villages in the Doab in this way, they had become in effect aristocratic rulers of agrarian kingdoms, though they still dispatched annual raiding parties to the east.

  This transition to agrarian life meant major social change. We can only speculate, of course, but up to this point it seems that Aryan society had not been rigidly stratified: the lesser clansmen fought alongside their chieftains, and priests often took part in the raiding.23 But with agriculture came specialization. The Aryans found that they now had to integrate the dasas, the native farmers with agricultural knowhow, into their community, so the Vritra myths demonizing the dasas were becoming obsolete, since without their labor and expertise, the agrarian economy would fail. The demands of production a
lso meant that Aryans themselves had to toil in the fields, while others became carpenters, metalsmiths, potters, tanners, and weavers. They would now stay at home, while the best warriors were dispatched to fight in the east. There were probably power struggles between the rajas, who wielded power, and the priests, who gave it legitimacy. Breaking with centuries of tradition, all these innovations had to be grafted onto the Vedic mythos.

  Their new wealth and leisure gave the priests more time for contemplation, and they began to refine their concept of divinity. They had always seen the gods as participating in a loftier, more encompassing reality that was Being itself, which by the tenth century they had started to call Brahman (“The All”).24 Brahman was the power that held the cosmos together and enabled it to grow and develop. It was nameless, indefinable, and utterly transcendent. Devas were simply different manifestations of the Brahman: “They call him Indra, Mitra, Naruna, Agni, and he is heavenly noble-winged Garatman. To what is One, sages give many a title.”25 With almost forensic determination, the new breed of rishis were intent on discovering this mysterious unifying principle; the all-too-human devas were not only a distraction but were becoming an embarrassment: they concealed rather than revealed the Brahman. Nobody, one rishi insisted, not even the highest of the gods, knows how our world came into being.26 The old stories of Indra slaying a monster to order the cosmos now seemed positively infantile.27 Gradually the gods’ personalities began to shrink.28