Indische Palaographie von circa 350 a. Chr. – circa 1300 p. Chr. c47.s1.7

c47.s1.7

Alongside of these sections were two classes or orders, evidently of later development: the nobles, headed by a Chieftain, and the ministers of religion, who conducted the public sacrifices. The mass of the community below these orders is collectively referred to as the "clans", or "peoples", always in the plural. The Family, as a unit, was strongly developed. Its worship was purely individual, strictly secluded from that of its neighbour, and conducted in private by the Paterfamilias conjointly with his wife. The tribal sacrifices were open to the "clans", and were conducted, at least in the stage to which the Sūktas relate, in the presence of the Chief of the tribe, by a priest acting on his behalf. It seems probable that the ritual had by then reached a pitch of complication which necessitated the employment of trained professionals, but the performance of this act of faith was not otherwise the exclusive privilege of the sacerdotal class, for occasionally scions of ruling families officiated, and there are cases in which the right of the priest was disputed by others. It is obvious, however, that the duties fell more and more into the hands of trained experts, irrespective of the personal separatism which tends to attach itself to a sacrificial priesthood, as the ceremonial became more elaborate, and still more, after the invocations which accompanied it had ceased to be improvised and the compositions of the older Psalmists were recited in a regular liturgy. The experts closed their ranks against the layman, and became a class by themselves, whether they maintained their numbers by heredity or recruitment. It may reasonably be assumed, too, that the order of nobles, especially in the case of tribal chieftains, would gradually tend towards a hereditary character, though the frequency of intertribal strife and the migratory life of the communities militated against the consolidation of political authority in such hands.