The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c8.s1.4

c8.s1.4

Although the purpose of the flood story is ostensibly found in the Iḍā ceremony of the sacrificial ritual, the linkage between flood and Iḍā is not as obvious as the text wants to make it. The story clearly falls into two independent parts, the flood on the one hand, the goddess Iḍā on the other. At the hinge between the two parts, we have already noticed some uneasiness, namely, where Mitra and Varuṇa intervene but immediately and inconclusively drop out of the story. More important, however, is the fact that the *Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa* is alone in bringing in the flood story at this point. The other brāhmaṇa texts give a different account of Iḍā, where Mitra and Varuṇa do indeed play an important part but where there is no mention of a cosmic flood. Conversely, the only other mention of the flood—a short reference in the *Kāṭhaka Saṃhitā*⁵—puts it in a different context and has nothing to say about Iḍā. Here too Manu, only survivor of the flood, makes an offering somewhat resembling the one in the *Śatapatha*’s story: “With that (offering) he performed the sacrifice,” this text tells us, “with that (offering) he spread out (*aprathata*), with that (offering) he went to this plenitude” (*imaṃ bhūmānam agacchat*). Although the image of spreading out the plenitude (or the earth’s plenitude) could conceivably be linked, or rather conflated, with the Iḍā theme, it belongs to a different context, namely the cosmogonic scenario of the demiurge spreading out and fastening the earth that has emerged from or floats on the primeval waters.⁶ The theme of the primeval waters and the *instabilis terra* blends easily enough with that of the flood, but the ghee-filled footprint, characteristic of Iḍā, has little of anything to do with either the floating earth or the flood.