Asvamedha or horse sacrifice and the Rajasaya, or consecration of a
king, may be attended by games and sports, but that is because they are
connected with secular events. In their essence sacrifices are not
popular festivals or holidays but private services, performed for the
benefit of the sacrificer, that is, the person who pays the fees of the
priests. Usually they have a definite object and, though ceremonies for
the attainment of material blessings are not wanting, this object is
most frequently supramundane, such as the fabrication of a body in the
heavenly world. It is in keeping with these characteristics that there
should be no pomp or spectacular effect: the rites resemble some
complicated culinary operation or scientific experiment, and the
sacrificial enclosure has the appearance of a laboratory rather than a
place of worship.

Vedic ritual includes the sacrifice of animals, and there are
indications of the former prevalence of human sacrifice. At the time
when the Brahmanas were composed the human victims were released alive,
but afterwards the practice of real sacrifice was revived, probably
owing to the continual incorporation into the Hindu community of
semi-barbarous tribes and their savage deities. Human victims were
offered to Mahadevi the spouse of Siva until the last century, and would
doubtless be offered now, were legal restrictions removed. But though
the sporadic survival of an old custom in its most primitive and
barbarous form is characteristic of Hinduism, the whole tendency of
thought and practice since the rise of Buddhism has been adverse to
religious bloodshed, even of animals. The doctrine of substitution and
atonement, of offering the victim on behalf of the sacrificer, though
not absent, plays a smaller part than in the religions of Western Asia.

Evidently it was not congenial: the Hindu has always been inclined to
think that the individual earns his future in another world by his own
thoughts and acts. Even the value of the victim is less important than
the correct performance of the ceremony. The teaching of the Brahmanas
is not so much that a good heart is better than lavish alms as that the
ritually correct sacrifice of a cake is better than a hecatomb not
offered according to rule.

The offerings required by the Vedic ritual are very varied. The simplest
are cakes and libations of melted butter poured on the fire from two
wooden spoons held one over the other while Vedic vers