MVVM: Kusomo's and Abraham's Sacrifices

M. Vincent van Mechelen

KUSUMO'S AND ABRAHAM'S SACRIFICES

Introduction

Fortunately, the number of stories in which one or two parents are claimed to have been commanded by a deity to kill their (supposedly) first, last or even only child is small — one would not like a manipulating or despotic divine being sive Supreme Being to have and take such a gruesome chance too often. And yet, in spite of their small number these stories are definitely not all the same. As a matter of fact, there are interesting differences between them, some of them doubtless morally relevant. A great many people will be familiar with at least one version of one of these stories; if not with the story of Abraham's binding and (near-)sacrifice of his son in Judaism¹ or Christianity, then with the later story of Ibrahim's near-sacrifice of his son in Islam. By contrast, i* expect only few people to have even heard of the Hinduist story of Kyai and Nyai Kusumo's attempted sacrifice of their son and only child. While narratively speaking Ibrahim's action took place in the far west of Asia, Kyai Kusumo's is set in the southeast of that continent; in the eastern part of the Indonesian island of Java. Some may equate (or confuse?) the story of Kusomo's near-sacrifice with the Legend of Mount Bromo in which Seger and Anteng figure as parents, but because its resemblance with the legend of Abraham's sacrificial filicide or near-sacrifice is clearly greater, i will treat the story of the Kusumos as one in its own right here. Since their near-sacrifice may have remained hidden in the heavy shade of the Abrahamic and earlier Hinduist tales, some special attention for the Kusumos should broaden our view of the similarities and differences between the related stories about a (purportedly) real or attempted filicide with a religious motive.

The several versions of Kusumo's Sacrifice

The name of the active volcano Gunung Bromo or 'Mount Bromo' derives from the Javanese pronunciation of Brahma. (Of the three gods Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva / Rudra in Hinduism, Brahma is the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver and Shiva the Destroyer of the universe.) As the ubiquitous crow flies, Mount Bromo is only about 60 kilometers from Trowulan, which used to be the site of the capital of ancient Majapahit. Majapahit is one of the largest and most powerful empires in the history of Southeast Asia, stretching from present-day southern Thailand to the western part of West Irian. This Hinduist country, in which Buddhism and minor religions were tolerated, was established in the thirteenth century of the Christianist Era, and taken over by the Demak Sultanate, a Javanese Muslim state, in the sixteenth century of that era. Many years before the take-over Majapahit was already in decline, and it is to this period, the fifteenth century, that the Legend of Mount Bromo² dates back. As in all religious stories history and mythology may be mixed up here, but it is said that the princess Roro Anteng and her husband Jaka (or Joko?) Seger established a separate principality in the eastern mountains of Java, combined the second syllables of their two family names, and called it "Tengger". For a long time the couple had no children and desperate for descendants they prayed to 'the gods' (Brahma? Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva together? Some lesser gods?) at Mount Bromo. Thereupon, no fewer than twenty-five children saw the light of day, enough for the couple to become the ancestors of all Tenggerese. But only the Sun rises for free, and even this is an illusion. (For it is the Earth itself which does practically all the moving.) The one or more gods down in the Bromo volcano finally demanded a reward: the sacrifice of the couple's last child! Even tho** this child was only one out of twenty-five, its mother —eternal praise be upon her— showed herself an example to all humanity by vehemently rejecting the divine request. However, the familiar theodemonical across-the-board commination of a giant pit of fire forever showered with brimstone to castigate their precious selves and all their unsuspecting relatives and, perhaps, unrelated friends forced the poor couple to obey the order, after which the even poorer child was thrown into the crater. It was thus that the grief-stricken parents committed both filicide and pedocide ('paedocide') in spite of themselves.

The 'official' (English-language) Legend of Mount Bromo as outlined above is not what brought me in touch with Tenggerese literature, religion and history; it was a story in a Dutch-language book, titled (in translation) "Indonesian Fairy Tales — fairy tales, legends and myths from the Indonesian Archipelago", and published 15 years ago. The story was called "Het offer van Koesomo" or "Kusomo's Sacrifice", and i was immediately struck by the resemblance between this Hinduist narrative and the Abrahamic narrative of a sacrificial filicide. I started searching for more information, especially more information in languages other than Dutch. (I visited Java and Bali once, but, apart from a few words, i do not have any command of the Indonesian language, let alone of Tengger Javanese.) Altho i found a few Dutch-language variants of the story, i discovered only one English-language variant by an author of similar descent again: Adèle De Leeuw, a Dutch-American whose Indonesian Legends and Folk Tales contained another version of the story i was looking for. (De Leeuw also wrote Legends and Folk Tales of Holland.)

It is common usage in Dutch to change the letter u in foreign words and names into oe if that letter is (approximately) pronounced as the vowel in book. But even when allowing for this difference in spelling there still appear three different names for the same male-female couple in the story. To the child De Leeuw does not give a name at all, but in the other versions of the story the child is a boy called "Madin", after his father, who used to have this name in his youth. In one of these versions Madin remains Madin, but elsewhere Madin's parents are ordered to change his name into Tengger after the episode at the crater when the intended sacrifice is halted. (While this may 'explain' the origin of the name given to the Tenggerese people, it does not make clear why Brahma would have chosen this name.) One on-line version, not to be listed or mentioned here anymore***, turned out to be no more than a copy of the story in the Volksverhalen Almanak, without referring to this source and with all kinds of fragments left out. Here is a table with the various versions, their authors and the names they use for the parents and for the child to be sacrificed:

AUTHOR(S) AND DATE	TITLE	HUMAN PROTAGONISTS
Adèle De Leeuw, 1961 ChrE	The Origin of the Bromo Feast ³	Kyai & Nyai Kesuma (child unnamed)
Corry van Straten, (?)	De legende van de Bromo ⁴	Kjai & Njai Koesoemo, Madin
M. Prick van Wely, B. Oosterhout, 2003 ChrE	Het offer van Koesomo ⁵	Kjai & Njai Koesomo, Madin / Tengger
(?: Volksverhalen Almanak), (?)	Het offer van Kusomo ⁶	Kjai & Bok/Njai Kusomo, Madin / Tengger

The full title and 'subtitle' of the version in Volksverhalen Almanak is Het offer van Kusomo — Een Javaanse sage over een man die zijn zoon offert aan Brahma, which means Kusomo's Sacrifice — A Javanese saga about a man who sacrifices his son to Brahma. (Note the blatantly androcentrist view of what is a male-female couple forced to kill, not just his, but their son!) The titles which De Leeuw and Van Straten give to the story (The Origin of the Bromo Feast and The Legend of the Bromo) do not relate to its contents proper but rather to its function of 'disclosing' the origin of the yearly celebrations by Hinduists in the Tengger mountains. De Leeuw uses the surname Kesuma for the parents, but in what i gather to be the 'real', fifteenth-century Legend of Mount Bromo, as related by Christine Knoll, for instance, that name is used for the twenty-fifth child of Seger and Anteng. That Kesuma (the child) was sacrificially put to death in the true sense of the word and could never have become a Kyai or Nyai Kesuma later in life, after which the narrative would only have started to repeat itself. The surname Van Straten uses (in Dutch), Koesoemo, seems to be the best representation for all four variants; so, i have decided to use that one. In a modern Indonesian rendering it will be Kusumo. I have chosen this spelling of the name in English too.

Kusumo's Sacrifice in a nutshell

"Once there was an old couple, Kyai and Nyai Kusumo, who lived in the eastern mountains of Java. They had everything they could desire, except a child: many years of praying to Brahma had not helped. One evening a hungry and tired ragged old man knocked on their door, and they gave him food and shelter; the next morning he had changed into a handsome young man who turned out to have been sent by Brahma with the message that within one year a son would be born to them. The same person also told the Kusumos that he would be back as soon as their son was old enough ⁷ and let them know what Brahma was going to require of them in recompense. He was sure that the couple would fulfil Brahma's every wish, upon which they bowed their grey heads to the earth. And, indeed, one year after this visit Kyai and Nyai Kusumo finally had a boy child, a gorgeous one whom they named 'Madin', after his father in the days of his youth."

"Then, when Madin had grown sufficiently Brahma's messenger came back and told the couple to climb up to the Bromo crater in order to offer their son to Brahma there by throwing him into the fire. Without a murmur the two old people were going to comply. But just before sacrificing their son, they implored Brahma to take their own lives too, giving serious reasons for not being able to live on anymore, once their son and only child was dead. Upon hearing their well-founded request Brahma told them that He had merely wanted to ascertain their willingness to obey Him, and that now that they had given Him proof, they could return to their home, provided they would call their son "Tengger" henceforth. Back home they took the fattest goat and the fairest grain in their possession and offered these at the rim of the crater instead. Every year the Kusumos brought such an offering to Mount Bromo again, and it later became a tradition among Hindus in the whole area."

The versions of Abraham's or Ibrahim's Sacrifice

It is relatively easy to compare two stories which exist without variants, but in the course of history the several versions of the story of Abraham's or Ibrahim's 'sacrifice', usually a near-sacrifice, differ considerably more from one another than the few probably (almost) contemporary variants of Kusumo's Sacrifice i have listed above. For an interesting outline of the development of the narrative of Abraham's 'sacrifice' from early Jewish times see, for example, Zeeshan Hasan's The History of Abraham, first published in 2006 ChrE ⁸. As Hasan points out, the consensus among modern Biblical scholars is that the Hebrew Bible is composed of at least three different sources: an E source referring to God by the name of Elohim, and the R or RJE source of a certain Redactor who edits the E source together with another J one in which God is called "Yahweh" or "Jehovah". The (most repeated and therefore) best known version of Abraham's Sacrifice is the one in which Abraham's son is replaced at the very last moment by a merciful god with a (nonhuman) animal, which is the RJE version. Hasan argues that in the pure E story, Abraham did sacrifice his son. It is only 'on second thought' that this idea was later abanboned by an editor of the text in favor of a more compassionate, that is, a little bit less hard-hearted, conception of the Abrahamic deity.

No doubt, the idea that it was God / Allah who commanded Abraham / Ibrahim to sacrifice his son is part of the mainstream Abrahamic narrative; Judaist, Christianist, Sunnite and Shiite. In all versions Abraham / Ibrahim had a vision or dreamed, before he got up early in the morning, that God / Allah ordered him to put his son to death, but this in itself does not prove that God / Allah did order him to slay his son, not even in the context of a story which is a product of the supernaturalist imagination. Quite appropriately, it has been claimed that it nowhere states explicitly in the Koran (also romanized "Quran" or "Qur'an") that Ibrahim's dream was really a divine command; that there need not have been such a command to sacrifice the life of an innocent human being. On the contrary: in this interpretation it is precisely Allah who prevents such a homicide from taking place in the case of Ibrahim's son; and in this interpretation there is no god ordering such a child murder only to make sure that He is unblinkingly obeyed under all conditions or deeply feared under all circumstances. The divine protagonist is thus made to act as an other-regarding Savior rather than as a self-centered Manipulator or, worse, Despot ⁹. This reading of the Koran makes a tremendous moral difference and some apologetic exegeses of the Bible attempt to take this track as well. Obviously, i am not in a position to judge whether the it-was-only-in-a-dream reading of this part of the Koran is honest and correct. Moreover, there is the further complication that in the case of any contradiction in that 114-chapter work (of around 80,000 words) a passage added later overrules an earlier one.

The question of an innocent child (an infant, minor or adolescent) 'actually' being killed and the question of the deity you believe in 'actually' having ordered this killing are to do with two of the weightiest differences between the one sacrifice-your-son-for-a-god story and the other. But there is another weighty difference awaiting us. We encounter it in the Koranic version, where Ibrahim discusses the dream in which he is urged to sacrifice his son with the one to be sacrificed himself; which is remarkable, if not unique! Ibrahim's son, who is not bound to the altar (as in the Bible), does not shrink away from his father's account of what is to be done to him. "Oh, my father," he says, "do that which you are commanded. God willing, you will find me of the steadfast" ¹⁰. Hence, it is not only the father but also the son who knowingly submits. It goes without saying that whether he submitted freely will depend on what would happen if he did not agree to the arrangement. If the command was not merely dreamed-up but 'real', one may assume that he would have been slaughtered anyhow.

In the Koran the name of the son Ibrahim intended to kill is not mentioned, a vagueness which in itself may be understood to imply that it was Isha(a)q (Isaac). In the beginning of Islam this did indeed give rise to a dispute over his identity. The present-day mainstream belief is that it was Is(h)mail (Ishmael), child of Hajar or 'Haj(i)ra(h)' (Hagar) and her eighty-six-year-old husband Ibrahim, whose second wife she may have become. In the Bible the name of the son Abraham intended to, or did, kill is mentioned: it is Isaac, altho Isaac is called "your only one", which is wrong, or "your only one(,) whom you love", which might be right. Isaac is the child of the ninety-year-old Sarah and her ten years older half-brother Abraham. Since Ishmail was Ibrahim's first son, it is only in the Koranic version that Ibrahim was prepared to kill his only son; in the Biblical story Abraham already had a son (loved or not loved), albeit out of wedlock. (That son, Ishmael, and his mother, the handmaid Hagar, were thrown overboard at Sarah's instigation and at God's command.)

Kusumo's and Abraham's / Ibrahim's Sacrifice compared

Father or parents?

The story of Kyai and Nyai Kusomo having to sacrifice their son is called "Kusomo's Sacrifice" (Het offer van Koesoemo) by their authors, and above i have left this title as it is to refer to the story. Yet, it is a title at a steep slant, for the sacrifice is not just (Kyai) Kusumo's, the sacrifice is the Kusumos'! Madin's two parents play an almost completely equal role in the event; only his actual killing would be done by his father, who is the stronger of the two. Nowhere does the father have a dream or something and then decide all on his own, while 'forgetting' to consult the boy's mother (Kyai's wife), to slaughter their conjugal child. From beginning to end the Kusomos are a couple hearing from Brahma's messenger that they will have a son, hearing from the same person that they will lose their son, and hearing from Brahma Himself that they together may keep their son. In this respect the story of the Kusomos' intended sacrifice and also the fifteenth-century Legend of Mount Bromo are diametrically opposed to the story of Abraham's or Ibrahim's intended sacrifice. In all the versions of the latter story, no woman, wife or handmaid, has any say whatsoever in the matter of her own child that is on the verge of being killed because of what her husband or master believes and desires or, worse, dreamed.

Divine manipulation or not?

Commanding you not to lie and not to steal is one thing, commanding you to kill your child in order to demonstrate your unconditional obedience is, we now know, two other things. It may mean that you will kill your child and lose it forever; it may also mean that your child will be replaced with something not dear to you at the very last moment. (This latter thing can, of course, only be done once, or a very limited number of times, because after the word spreads that a child offered for sacrifice will not really be killed, the willingness to sacrifice stops being a proof of obedience.) Kusumo's child is not killed in the end, nor is Abraham's or Ibrahim's child, except in the original Elohim version of Abraham's Sacrifice. So, in almost none of these tales is the Supreme Being of the creed in question portrayed as an absolute Despot. However, a Manipulator this deity usually is, as it abuses the parents' or the father's ignorance of what it secretly has in mind for their or his child. "I only wanted to find out if you were willing to follow me," Brahma tells the Kusumos, who could never have made the mistake of only dreaming that Brahma had ordered them to sacrifice Madin. Within the narrative context the Kusumos did not dream anything, and therefore Brahma's behavior in the story is outright manipulation. It is only in Ibrahim's story, if interpreted in an alternative way, that the Supreme Being may not have been intent upon an abominable show of obedience, but did, quite unlike that, interfere to save an innocent life whose loss He would not have been responsible for to start with. That, of course, requires that one is able and allowed to accept that Ibrahim was merely led astray by his own dream.

What about the child?

In the Biblical Abraham's Sacrifice Isaac is not in any way properly forewarned of what is going to happen or it must be his binding which is supposed to count as such. There just is no verbal communication between Abraham and Isaac at all, not before, not during and not after the (attempt at) sacrifice takes place, that is, not a word about this traumatic event. The Koranic Ibrahim's Sacrifice distinguishes itself at least in one important respect from the Bible in that the father does discuss the matter with his son Ishmail (or else Ishaaq), who does, freely or not, surrender to his father's and/or Allah's wish. Not only is this important narrative feature not found in the Bible, it is not found in any of the variants of Kusumo's Sacrifice either. Nonetheless, apart from this one aspect, from a narrative point of view the child is still treated in divergent ways in these variants. In De Leeuw's story of the origin of the Bromo Feast the child to be killed does not have a name and not a particular age at the time of its intended sacrifice either, nor is it spoken to on the way to the crater in the mountains. Also the child himself —as in all narratives of this type it happens to be a boy— does not ask or say anything before or during the planned sacrifice; it is only when the ordeal is over and the boy returns to the site with more palatable offerings that he speaks to 'Mighty Brahma'. In Van Straten's story Madin, that is, the son, is ten years old at the time of what would be both a filicide and a pedocide, but he speaks nowhere in the whole story, not to his parents, not to Brahma. In Indonesian Fairy Tales (Indonesische Sprookjes) and the Almanac of Folk Tales (Volksverhalen Almanak), Madin is also ten years old, but now does use his voice on the way to the site of the sacrifice already. This certainly makes the narrative more dramatic and it demonstrates what the heinous abuse of power by a parent and the demonical manipulation by a deity may mean to a child: "Papa, where are we going, and what are we gonna do? ... ... But we don't have fruits and flowers with us, like the other people. What are we gonna sacrifice?" ¹¹.

Are Kusumo's and Abraham's Sacrifice related?

Obviously, Kusumo's Sacrifice is very closely related to the Legend of Mount Bromo — Van Straten even gives the story the (Dutch) title De legende van de Bromo. And obviously, the Legend of Mount Bromo is a Hinduist story dating back to pre-Islamic times in Indonesia. So, it would not be too farfetched to suggest a connection of the Legend with Hindu literature on the Indian subcontinent. For such a connection to exist some characteristic elements in the Legend of the Bromo and/or Kusumo's Sacrifice ought to occur in ancient Indian mythology, literature or daily rituals and practices as well. The first thing which comes to mind, then, is human sacrifices, and more in particular child sacrifices. There is indeed a remarkable epic of ancient India which tells the story of the childless (!) King Harischandra who asks the god (!) Varuna to grant him a son ¹². Varuna is willing to fulfil his wish, provided Harischandra will later sacrifice his son to him! When Rohita, the son, is full-grown he himself buys the son of a poor Brahmin to be bound to the stake instead. (Note that it is typical of a Hindu sacrifice that the victim is killed by fire.) And yet, also this story turns out to be one about a near-sacrifice, because Rohita's substitute manages to free himself by piously reciting a couple of mantras. Who is Varuna? He is a Vedic deity who is said to have had demonic violent tendencies. (Nevertheless, in one of the texts Varuna is the father of Brahma.) There may be parallels with Ahura Mazda, the Creator and sole god of Zoroastrianism, the ancient Iranian religion which once spread across Central and West Asia. Thus, our journey away from the Tengger mountains has taken us to the area in West Asia which is the cradle of the Abrahamic religions. I have not proved anything here; not even tried to; i have only wanted to show that intimate mythological connections between the Jewish sources of the Abrahamic religions and the sources of Zoroastrianism and Hinduism need not surprise us at all. (Religious myths may just have trodden the same path as Hindu-Arabic numerals.) We had better turn now to the connections about which we know much more.

The genealogy of the versions of Abraham's Sacrifice carries no great mystery anymore, so long as one does not try to go back further than the times of the Jewish sources. Given these sources, the family history from the doctrine taught by the prophet Moses and lesser ones to the doctrine taught by the prophet Jesus to the doctrine taught by the prophet Mohammed (or 'Muhammad') is pretty straightforward: one family member left an old thing out, another added a new thing to basically the same story. The most remarkable old thing left out is probably the actual killing of Isaac in the authentic Elohim variant of the sacrifice; the most remarkable new thing added is, in my eyes, that the Koran speaks at least of some kind of attempt to let the son take part in the decision process. But how did the variants of Kusumo's Sacrifice come into being? While they are clearly close to the Legend of Mount Bromo in which Anteng and Seger figure as the ancestors of the Tenggerese, they equally clearly distance themselves from that legend. First of all, Madin in Kusumo's Sacrifice is not sacrificed in the end, whereas Kesuma in the Legend is. This may be due to the fact that Madin's parents never protested against the command, whereas Kesuma's mother, and perhaps father too, initially refused to comply with it. Another major difference between the two Tenggerese stories is that Madin is an only child: he does not even have a half-sib or a stepsib, let alone an elder one. Kesuma, on the other hand, has twenty-four sibs: the total of twenty-five children in this child's family was probably meant to be a demographic weapon against the usurpers or successors of the Majapahit Kingdom in the central and eastern part of Java. Furthermore, Madin's parents are portrayed as monotheists with Brahma as their sole god or Supreme Being, whereas Kesuma's parents pray to 'the gods' (in spite of the volcano being called after Brahma only). Note that on top of this Brahma has a son who acts as messenger to the Kusumos! In the Legend it is the gods who consent to the childless parents' request, who threaten with revenge and whose anger will later have to be appeased in a yearly ceremony. Everything that distinguishes Kusumo's Sacrifice from the Legend bears the characteristics of Abraham's Sacrifice, and it makes one wonder if, and to what extent, Kusumo's Sacrifice is an original tale. It may just be a Javanese Hinduist story restrained in a Dutch Christianist straitjacket. With Java under ages of commercial dominance and colonial rule by the Netherlands this would be quite possible.

*	Unless its capitalization follows a general rule, i will be spelling the first-person singular pronoun in This Language with a small i, as i do not consider myself a God, a Supreme Being or anything else of that Ilk. [<]
**	Where a choice between spellings does not depend on the application of a morphological rule, the most phonematic ('phonetic'), or the least unphonematic, variant will be given priority. [<]
***	Where two or three orthographical variants do not differ in morphological or phonological quality, a rule favoring a more concise spelling with fewer spaces and/or hyphens will be followed, as in fountainpen.) [<]

73.ENW

¹ Something that applies to all people and peoples is that a person who is a native of a certain part of the world is not by definition an adherent of, or a believer in, a certain world view, not even a religion which has a unique relationship with that part of the world. Hence, sound communication requires the possibility of referring to the native and to the believer by means of two clearly different words. In the historical context of the present document this requirement concerns especially 'Hindus' and 'Jews' in the days long before the states of India, Pakistan, Israel and Bangladesh were founded. They are persons who may belong to any creed, among which Hinduism and Judaism, and who may also not belong to any such creed. I will take care to avoid category mismatches in particular: where there is talk of Christians (not 'Europeans' or some such term) and/or Muslims (not 'Arabs' or some such term), there shall also be talk of Hinduists instead of Hindus, and of Judaists instead of Jews. [<]
² The Legend of the Bromo – A fiery folk tale, words by Christine Knoll; retrieved 18 March 2018, from langaraprm.com/[ ]2012/[ ]community/[ ]mount-bromo/ [<]
³ In Indonesian Legends and Folk Tales, pp. 26-29, Twenty-six tales from the folklore of such islands as Sumatra, Java, and the Celebes, telling of the origins of many of their people's beliefs and names for local geography, told by Adèle De Leeuw, Thomas Nelson & Sons, New York, 1961, 160 pages [<]
⁴ De legende van de Bromo – Een Hindoelegende uit Indonesië, by Corry van Straten; retrieved 18 March 2018, from www.troostvoortranen.nl/[ ]?InfoTypeSysName=contentitem[ ]&PkValue=2508 [<]
⁵ In Indonesische Sprookjes — sprookjes, sagen en mythen uit de Indonesische Archipel, pp. 109-113, M. Prick van Wely en B. Oosterhout, ©2003, Uitgeverij Elmar, Rijswijk, 268 pages [<]
⁶ Het offer van Kusomo — Een Javaanse sage over een man die zijn zoon offert aan Brahma; retrieved 22 March 2018, from www.beleven.org/[ ]verhaal/[ ]het_offer_van_kusomo [<]
⁷ In De Leeuw the messenger of Brahma will return 'when this son is full-grown' (p.27); and did return 'when the boy had reached young manhood' (p.28). In the three other variants of Kusumo's Sacrifice studied by me Madin is said to be 10 years old at the time of the intended sacrifice [<]
⁸ It can also be found at www.liberalislam.net/[ ]abraham [<]
⁹ I found this interpretation at en.wikipedia.org/[ ]wiki/[ ]Abraham_in_Islam under Sacrifice [<]
¹⁰ Koran/Quran 37:102. Naturally, this (translation) does not literally convey the words one would expect a child to speak. [<]
¹¹ In the Almanac of Folk Tales: "Vader, waar gaan we heen, en wat gaan we doen?" vroeg hij. ... ... "Maar we hebben geen vruchten bij ons en geen bloemen. Waar is de offergave dan?" In Indonesian Fairy Tales, p. 112: "Waar gaan we heen, vader?" vroeg hij. ... ... "Wat gaan we dan offeren? Wij hebben geen vruchten en bloemen bij ons, zoals de andere mensen." [<]
¹² See, for example, en.wikipedia.org/[ ]wiki/[ ]Purushamedha under Performance in Hindu epics; for some information about the gods Varuna and Ahura Mazda see en.wikipedia.org/[ ]wiki/Varuna and /Ahura_Mazda; all three retrieved 11 April 2018 [<]