The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c11.s5.5

v1.c11.s5.5

The danger of seeking to minimize the connexion between priests and people is seen in the suggestion that the gods of the domestic ritual, who are in large measure those of the Çrauta sacrifices, are figures imposed by the priests on popular usage, for it leads to the doctrine that Brahman had not the slightest popular hold, a suggestion irreconcilable with the prominence given to that deity in the Buddhist scriptures. Similarly an artificial origin is attributed to the nature spirits and abstract hypostases which appear very freely in the domestic ritual. Yet comparative religion suggests at once that these are far from priestly inventions, that they belong rather to the type of Sondergötter,³ who are genuinely popular figures, even if in the texts we have we can trace priestly elaboration. So again we cannot with any security assert that the fire as the means of sacrifice is a sign of priestly intervention, as opposed to the simpler Bali sacrifice in which the object offered is deposited on the ground or thrown into the air or hung on a tree. Fire, we must remember, is itself a deity, and the suggestion that it was so only to the priests is contrary to the ethnic fact of primitive fire worship. Thus offerings in the fire for it were natural and primitive, and we can hardly assert that the giving to the gods of offerings in the fire was not a simple development even for the popular mind.