Sacred Creatures, Sacred Witness

Bhuta-yajna and the Hindu Household's Daily Offering to All Beings

Why a Hindu household feeds the anthill, the crow, the stray dog, and the snake before the family eats. The bhuta-yajna, one of the five panchamahayajnas, is the original ecological ethic. The wellness industry rebranded it as 'spirit animals' and the emotional support animal industry. The grandmother kept the receipts.

The Anthill Behind the House

In a small house in Belgaum, in the Karnataka October of my eighth year, my Lakshmi ajji used to step out of the kitchen every morning carrying a steel tumbler of water and a piece of jowar roti. The first roti. The one any other household would have given to the man of the house. She walked to the back of the courtyard, where the rains had pushed up a small reddish anthill near the compound wall, and she poured the water in a thin circle around the mound. She crumbled the roti at its base. Then she stood for a moment with her eyes closed.

No one in the family had eaten yet. My grandfather was at the well. My uncle was still asleep. My mother was rolling out the next stack of rotis. The first food and the first water of the day went to the ants.

When I asked her once why we feed the ants before we feed ourselves, she said only this. They see. They witness. They remember.

She never explained the rest. She did not tell me that what she was performing was an ancient and codified rite called Bhuta-yajna, the daily offering to all creatures, named in the Manu Smriti as one of the five great sacrifices a householder owes every day. She did not tell me that the ants in front of her belonged to a global biomass of about twenty quadrillion individuals, more than every other land animal combined except humans. She did not tell me that an entire wing of the New Age wellness industry, worth several billion dollars, would in her lifetime sell a hollowed-out version of what she was doing and call it spirit animal work.