On Id-ul-Adha, the Moon, too, seems to have sacrificed some of Herself:
The festival is also called Bakrid, and this is not because the Bakri (Goat) is beingvenerated, it’s because it is going to be sacrificed…
I was musing on how the concept of sacrificing something to appease a Higher Power came about…
is what the Wiki had to say.
I wonder if the gentle, repressed people of today’s urban societies realize that the pumpkins that they smash into the roads after smearing them with vermilion….are a symbol of blood sacrifice? I listened to one elderly gentleman ("I am proud to be a Brahmin") holding forth on the horror of blood sacrifice on Id. This gentleman was utterly horrified when I explained to him how he too was upholding the ritual of sacrifice in a symbolic way…and he refused to accept the idea.
However, the idea that yielding up one life (even one’s own) will result in a reward in this world, or the next…that still intrigues me a lot.
Oh well, a lot of lambs to the slaughter would not find my post interesting at all….
⊕
Isn’t it amazing how people who do the pumpkin and blood ritual don’t see this? The story I heard is that Shankaracharya removed the ritual of animal sacrifice calling it impure and replaced it with a pumpkin with red vermillion. Hindu purists started to term it as a tantric ritual henceforth.