No gain, no pain

As Venus rises in the desert sky, talk in the Rann turns to animals making their way into myths and legends.

The Desert Jackal, or the Sial, for instance, comes in with the sacred lore of the Sri Dattatreya shrine on Kalo Dungar. Located on the highest point of Kutch, the temple is famous for ritual feeding of jackals.

Dattatreya supposedly found a band of starving jackals here during his wanderings. Being a sage, he offered them his body to eat and as they fed, his flesh miraculously regenerated itself !

Later, to honour this act of supreme self-sacrifice, priests at the Dattatreya temple began the practice of preparing a prasadfor the beasts. This was fed to the animals after the evening arti.

The jackals were ostensibly summoned with beating of vessels and cries of “Long! Long! Long!” (From Le ang, or ‘take the body’). Similarly, the Rig Veda also celebrates the selfsacrifice of Rishi Dadhyanch. He is supposed to have given away the secret of Soma, or Madhuvidya (also called the secret of the elixir of immortality), to the twin gods, Ashwins.

Indra, the chief of the gods, objects to the transfer and lops off the Rishi’s head, which is promptly replaced with a horse’s head by the magical twins!

Curiously, the myth of the horse-headed sage is also linked with the making of Indra’s Vajra, or Thunderbolt — with the Sage, described as the greatest among the clan of Brighus, giving away his life to enable the gods to fashion an invincible bolt-like weapon out of his virtuous or ‘selfeffulgent’ bones!

The Rishi is also said to be aVedic Prometheus, being associated with the transfer of the secret of fire to humans in ancient times. The moral of all these tales is that no sacrifice is too great if the result of it is the welfare of mankind.