The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27.s1.9

v1.c27.s1.9

It was of course essential that the god invited should be received in a due place, and that any honours which were possible should be paid to him. Hence the hymns of praise, the sound of music, and the dance: even perhaps the theosophical riddles³ with which at the great horse sacrifice the priests delighted one another, and it may well be the god, since gods were built by priests in their own image. But in addition to these features there was much more in the Vedic sacrifice, mimic combats, ribaldry, chariot racing, archery, dicing, and much else, which cannot be deemed save in quite a secondary way to have been thought to be part of the entertainment provided for the god. In the vast majority of these cases the nature of the ritual can be solved at once by the application of the concept sympathetic magic, and this is one of the most obvious and undeniable facts in the whole of the Vedic sacrifice : it is from beginning to end full of magic elements,¹ which can as a rule be perfectly easily disentangled from the rest of the rite. In some cases it is impossible not to feel that the rite is merely magic dressed up with sacrifice, but in the majority of rites no such view is possible, and in many the magic element is wholly secondary.