Pramāṇa · Search · About · API

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27.s7: § 7. The Performers of the Sacrifice

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27.s7

Language
English

Contents

§ 7. The Performers of the Sacrifice

v1.c27.s7.1

As we have seen, it is an essential part of the Vedic sacrifice that it is a sacrifice for an individual, the Yajamāna,⁴ or sacrificer, who provides the means for the sacrifice, and above all the rich rewards for the priests. The king is naturally the chief of sacrificers, for him alone such sacrifices as the royal consecration could be offered, but there are others, members of the royal house, high officers and soldiers among the Kṣatriyas, rich merchants or agriculturists, and also, we should certainly add, rich Brahmans themselves. After making all allowances for exaggeration, the gifts to the Brahmans must often have resulted in the accumulation by a Brahman of great wealth which would pass on to his son, and which in view of the conceptions of the Brahmans could certainly not be better spent than in the performance of sacrifice. But even in the case of the king, the sacrifice is for the prosperity of the king, and only incidentally for the prosperity of the realm and people: the prayer of the royal consecration shows this, and still more markedly the prayer of the horse sacrifice, which in effect is the real purpose of that sacrifice, and not a thank-offering or mere celebration of the success of the king: the Adhvaryu prays,¹ 'In holiness may a Brahman be born, full of holy radiance. In the kingly power be born a prince, a hero, a bowman, piercing with shafts, a mighty warrior. May the cow be rich in milk, strong the draught ox, swift the steed, fruitful the woman, eloquent the youth. May a hero son be born to the sacrificer. May Parjanya grant rain at all time according to our desire. May the corn ripen'. The bulk of the people are not even mentioned, but their pursuits, agriculture and the care of cattle, are alluded to.

v1.c27.s7.2

⁴ Oltramare, *Le rôle du Yajamāna dans le sacrifice brahmanique* (Louvain, 1903); Oldenberg, *Archiv f. Religionswissenschaft*, vii. 222–4, who very properly insists that the priest differs from the sacrificer mainly in the fact that by reason of his office he has less need of elaborate ritual preparation than the lay sacrificer. In the actual rite he is as much as the priest made divine.

v1.c27.s7.3

¹ VS. xxii. 22; TS. vii. 5. 18; KSAçv. v. 14; MS. iii. 12. 6.

v1.c27.s7.4

The position revealed by the ritual seems hardly to be natural: it would certainly be expected that there should be some recognition of the sacrifices of the tribe, and the scant traces of an Agni Sabhya and Āvasathya, which are adduced by Hillebrandt² as proving the existence of tribal sacrifices, are a poor substitute for the evidence which should be forthcoming. We cannot, however, doubt that the Vedic attitude to the clan is unnatural and is a sign of developed ritual, not of primitive relations. There is but one exception to the rule that the sacrifice is for an individual in the Sattras, 'sacrificial sessions', long sacrifices extending as much as and even over a year, in which the sacrificers are the whole body of Brahmans officiating, the performance of such sacrifices being only possible when all are Brahmans: in that case the rule is that the whole of the merit of the offering belongs to them all, while any evil done belongs to the one who does it. It is possible that we have the record here of an older period of family offerings,³ but it is far from certain that this is so, and it is not clear whether the Rigveda⁴ really knows of such rites: if not they must be priestly inventions, as in many respects they most certainly are, representing the imaginations of a priesthood, which desired nothing better than to spend its time in the technique of a curious and complicated ritual.

v1.c27.s7.5

² *Ved. Myth.* ii. 118–26.

v1.c27.s7.6

³ Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², p. 371.

v1.c27.s7.7

⁴ vii. 33. 13.

v1.c27.s7.8

In so developed a condition of religious practice it is not surprising to find that the priests had already made themselves indispensable at the Çrauta offerings:⁵ the householder might perform many of the domestic services himself, if he preferred to do so, and the poor man must have been in this position, but the Çrauta sacrifices demanded a priest or often several priests.

v1.c27.s7.9

⁵ Cf. Hubert and Mauss, *Année sociol.* ii. 52, who give Hebrew and Greek parallels.

v1.c27.s7.10

It is beyond doubt that in the time of the Rigveda the priesthood was normally hereditary: we have no material for a history of the growth of the special connexion of the families mentioned in the Rigveda such as the Viçvāmitras, Vasiṣṭhas, Atris, Bharadvājas, with the sacrifice: we may assume that at a period when the simpler relations of life prevailed, some family became associated with the ritual through the skill of one of its members or some possession of unusual powers, but that period lies far behind the Rigveda, especially if we believe as is quite possible that a priesthood arose in the Indo-European¹ period. But these families differ essentially in some respects from parallel institutions in other Indo-European lands, showing that the Indo-European idea of priesthood cannot have been highly developed. There is no trace among them of the characteristics of the sacred colleges of the Romans, like the Arval Brothers or the Salii, charged with the oversight of definite parts of the public sacrifices, for there were no public sacrifices. Nor again are they like the Greek families which had hereditary priesthoods, often recognized by the state as at Eleusis, for these again had definite gods or rites to care for, while the Vedic families in the main dealt with the same kinds of rites, the differences between families in the times of which we know being in detail rather than in general aspect. Doubtless the different families were originally marked out by much more serious differences in cult than those which we can verify: the whole process of the relation of the Rigveda and of the ritual suggests syncretism on a large basis, but the possibility of the development of the distinct priesthoods of Greece and Rome was in all probability hampered and finally prevented by the lack of the temple, and of the organization of public worship by the state. The state is a much more permanent instrument than any private men or kings could be: the Vedic kingship was, it is certain,² far from assured, by reason of foreign war and internal dissension, and the priests could not therefore gather as a standing priesthood around the royal house. Nor, to do them justice, do the priests seem to have desired to do so: the impression left by the Rigveda and the ritual alike is that priests were fond of wandering from place to place, performing rites for now this patron, and now that, a fact which probably explains how the innovations discovered from time to time by individuals had comparatively little chance of affecting seriously the main body of the ritual, which has come down to us in essentially the same shape, despite endless variation in unimportant minutiae. The radical changes, if any, perished with their inventors, or at best soon after.

v1.c27.s7.11

¹ Hirt, *Die Indogermanen*, pp. 514 ff.; Carnoy, *Les Indo-Européens*, pp. 235 ff.; Feist, *Kultur der Indogermanen*, p. 355. Meyer (*Gesch. d. Alt.*³ I. ii. pp. 870, 871, 916, 917) holds that the Indo-Europeans had probably already magicians, but no priesthood proper, which developed itself in Indo-Iranian times. *Inter alia* this theory rests on the false view that a magician is the first priest as held by Frazer, *The Magic Art*, i. 371 ff., 420 ff.; Henry, *La magie dans l'Inde antique*, pp. 34 ff.

v1.c27.s7.12

² Macdonell and Keith, *Vedic Index*, ii. 210 ff.

v1.c27.s7.13

One priest alone seems to have been definitely attached to the king, and less often to other rich persons of the warrior or the agricultural and trading classes, Kṣatriya or Vaiçya. This was the Purohita, *praepositus*, who was charged with the general control of the offerings to be performed in households, which were large enough to maintain a considerable body of priests, and to hire others for special rites. As a rule there can only have been one Purohita who probably acted as long as he and the king were alive and on good terms: we hear, however, of changes of Purohita, as that of Viçvāmitra for Vasiṣṭha, with the result of the effort of the rejected rival to overthrow the king by bringing a coalition of ten princes against him,¹ and there is no Vedic evidence to show that the later practice, which made the priesthood hereditary in the family of the priest prevailed, though one Purohita in some cases at least evidently served more than one prince in succession, or even according to the later texts one man might be Purohita of as many as three allied kings at once.² In this case, however, we may imagine that there were subordinate Purohitas also employed. The relation of king and Purohita was created by a very formal act in which the precise words of the wedding service were repeated,³ and there is abundant evidence that the Purohita was in religion and civil affairs the *alter ego* of the king.⁴ The law books⁵ make him out to be the king’s teacher in sacred and other learning, his councillor in the performance of all his duties, the dispenser of justice in the place of the king, and prone to interfere in royal successions: popular tales represent the evil Purohita as bringing to ruin the kingdom as the good preserves it, and the Rigveda⁶ already makes the prosperity of the whole realm depend on him. It may be taken as certain that he performed all the domestic ritual of the king’s household, with its many formulae and magic rites⁷ to secure the success of the king’s undertakings in war and peace, the correctness of his judgements, and the prosperity of his subjects: we see clearly from the Rigveda⁸ that the Purohita was expected to be in the battle to secure victory, not by arms, but by the weapons of his magic power; the Atharvaveda⁹ preserves a battle spell used by a Purohita in fight, and the Rigveda¹⁰ tells how the Purohita Devāpi won rain by a spell. The Brāhmaṇas represent the gods defeated by the Asuras as rushing to Bṛhaspati, who is the divine Purohita, and asking him to devise a new rite to overcome the Asuras, which he very properly at once does. Moreover, in the address to Agni when he is invoked as having aforetime favoured the ancestor of the invoker, when a king is the sacrificer, the name of his Purohita’s ancestor is used in place of his own: the Purohita must take part in offerings made to undo errors of the king in his capacity as criminal judge,¹ and in the sacrifice of the horse certain libations must be offered, according to some authorities, in the house of the Purohita.²

v1.c27.s7.14

¹ RV. vii. 18 and 33; Hopkins, JAOS. xv. 259 ff.; Oldenberg, ZDMG. xlii. 205 ff.; *Ṛgveda-Noten*, ii. 16–18; Macdonell and Keith, *Vedic Index*, ii. 275; Bloomfield, *Rig-Veda Repetitions*, pp. 646 f. See also JB. iii. 199–202 for the story of Kutsa and Upagu.

v1.c27.s7.15

² Macdonell and Keith, *Vedic Index*, ii. 5–8.

v1.c27.s7.16

³ AB. viii. 27.

v1.c27.s7.17

⁴ AB. viii. 24; ÇB. iv. 1. 4. 5, 6.

v1.c27.s7.18

⁵ Cf. Hopkins, JAOS. xiii. 151 ff.; Foy, *Die königliche Gewalt*.

v1.c27.s7.19

⁶ iv. 50. 8.

v1.c27.s7.20

⁷ Henry, *La magie dans l’Inde antique*, pp. 34, 38, 146 ff.; Bloomfield, *Atharvaveda*, pp. 73–76; N. N. Law, *Ancient Indian Polity*, pp. 152 ff.

v1.c27.s7.21

⁸ vii. 18.

v1.c27.s7.22

⁹ iii. 19; Kauç. xiv. 22, 23.

v1.c27.s7.23

¹⁰ x. 98; cf. Oldenberg, ZDMG. li. 274; Macdonell and Keith, *Vedic Index*, i. 377 f.

v1.c27.s7.24

¹ VDS. xix. 40.

v1.c27.s7.25

² ÇB. xiii. 4. 4. 1. So at the Rājasūya (TS. i. 8. 9) the Brahman in whose house sacrifice is made is probably the Purohita.

v1.c27.s7.26

From the Purohita must be distinguished the ordinary offering priest, and his relation to them may be assumed to have been that suggested by his name: he was the superintendent who took the care of the offerings, and saw that they were duly carried out. But it is obvious that he might, as a Brahman and as competent *ex hypothesi* to supervise every rite, undertake some part himself, and we have every reason to think that he did so. In the case of Devāpi he was not only Purohita, but at the sacrifice performed by him as a rain spell he acted as the Hotṛ priest: similarly Agni is Purohita as well as Hotṛ priest,³ and the two divine Hotṛs who are invoked in the Āprī litanies are also called the two Purohitas.⁴ That this was the older rule, seems suggested by the fact that the Hotṛ was clearly in the time of the composition of the poetry of the Rigveda the really important priest, and that the Purohita would naturally take his office, as it was taken in some cases by the sacrificer himself.⁵ With the growth of the ritual, however, and its increasing complication, a sure sign that the poetry was ceasing to be the main point of interest to the priest, it was only natural that the overseer of the sacrifice should become a priest different from the Hotṛ, namely the Brahman priest to whom in the ritual as opposed to the Rigveda the duty of caring for the sacrifice as a whole is assigned. Hence we find that the Brāhmaṇas assert that the Purohita is the Brahman priest, and that the Vasiṣṭhas as Purohitas and Brahmans are specially meritorious,⁶ while the divine Purohita, Bṛhaspati, becomes the Brahman priest of the god in the technical sense of the term. But even then the Purohita seems not to have been tied down to any one function: he could, if he preferred, act as a Sāman singer.⁷

v1.c27.s7.27

³ RV. i. 1. 1; ii. 3. 2; 11. 1; v. 11. 2, &c.

v1.c27.s7.28

⁴ RV. x. 66. 13; 70. 7.

v1.c27.s7.29

⁵ ĀpÇS. xii. 17. 2; GGS. i. 9. 9.

v1.c27.s7.30

⁶ AB. vii. 26; TS. iii. 5. 2. 1; Geldner, *Ved. Stud.* ii. 144 ff.

v1.c27.s7.31

⁷ PB. xiv. 6. 8.

v1.c27.s7.32

In the later literature after the Vedic period the figure of the Purohita retains in even increased force the importance which it has for the Veda. It is clear that in him we have the aggressive and active side of priestly interference in human affairs: the ordinary offering priest must be deemed in comparison to have been a technical priest, or scholar engaged in reflection, and the proud position asserted for priests generally never in fact was attained by them. The position of the Purohita therefore never essentially affected the priesthood as a whole, and it was made only possible by the existence when the practice developed of the hereditary priesthood and the belief that offerings required priestly intervention to be successful. The Purohita, therefore,⁸ is not to be treated as more than an incidental factor in the growth of the caste system, and it must be remembered that in the time of the later literature the whole aspect of the priesthood was profoundly affected by the existence of temple worship with its apparatus of bodies of priests and the growth of traditional practices.

v1.c27.s7.33

⁸ Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², pp. 375 ff. Macdonell and Keith, *Vedic Index*, ii. 5 ff.; N. N. Law, *Ancient Indian Polity*, pp. 38 ff.

v1.c27.s7.34

Of the ordinary priest we have, as we have seen, a good many details in the Rigveda: specially often do we hear of seven Hotṛs, who presumably must correspond to the seven Seers whom the Rigveda¹ also mentions. This list may be given by detail in one passage of the Rigveda where Agni is identified with the Hotṛ, the Potṛ, the Neṣṭṛ, the Agnīdh, the Praçāstṛ, the Adhvaryu, and the Brahman as well as with the householder himself. The same list, save for the Upavaktṛ, who seems to be identical in essence with the Praçāstṛ, appears as the list of priests to whom the Achāvāka, a later addition to the priesthood, addresses a request to be admitted to share the Soma.² Another list, given in connexion with the morning pressing of the Soma, is slightly different: it includes the Hotṛ, two Adhvaryus, two Praçāstṛs, Brahman, Potṛ, Neṣṭṛ, and Āgnīdhra.³ The second Adhvaryu is evidently an addition: in the later period he is the Pratiprasthātṛ; the second Praçāstṛ is similarly the Achāvāka in the later ritual. The list also agrees, in the main but not completely, with the list of priests, who have cups and altars in the Soma sacrifice.⁴ The old list is comparable with the eight of the Avesta,⁵ but the comparison is not in detail exact, and we may doubt whether we can safely assume more than a general similarity between the Indo-Iranian and the Vedic cult: the exact degree of the development of the separation of functions is not to be determined with certainty. The Hotṛ is clearly the Zaotar, the Agnīdh has the same duty as the Ātarevakhša, and the Potṛ as the Āsnatare, the washer of the Soma. But it is impossible to find the counterpart to the singers of the Vedic ritual.

v1.c27.s7.35

¹ ii. 1. 2.

v1.c27.s7.36

² KB. xxviii. 5; ÇÇS. vii. 6. 7; AÇS. v. 7. 3; KÇS. ix. 12. 11.

v1.c27.s7.37

³ KÇS. ix. 8. 8 ff.

v1.c27.s7.38

⁴ Weber, *Ind. Stud.* x. 366, 377.

v1.c27.s7.39

⁵ Henry, *L'Agniṣṭoma*, pp. 477 ff.

v1.c27.s7.40.1

The Hotṛ must from his name have been originally at once the performer of the offering and the speaker of any words which accompanied it, but the distinction between the two portions of the functions of the Hotṛ must have developed quite early, perhaps even before the close of the Indo-Iranian period. In the Vedic ritual text-books a fundamental distinction is drawn between two kinds of offerings, which are called Yajatayas and Juhotayas respectively: in the former there is but one speaker and actor, who is, however, called Adhvaryu, not Hotṛ, from the more important side of his functions; in the latter there is, beside the Adhvaryu who performs the manual acts, the Hotṛ to recite. The extent of the function of the Hotṛ varies very greatly: in a large number of offerings the only verses which he has to repeat are the Puronuvākyā and the Yājyā. The first is a verse addressed to the god inviting him to be present at the offering to be made to him; the latter is said just at the end when the Adhvaryu is about to throw the offering into the fire; after it the Hotṛ says the word Vauṣaṭ, of doubtful sense and meaning,¹ and thereafter often a brief formula addressed to the god bidding him enjoy the offering, terminating with Vauṣaṭ again, the whole phrase forming the ‘secondary Vaṣaṭ’ (*anu-vaṣaṭkāra*) which is constantly referred to in the sacrifice.

v1.c27.s7.40.2

The Yājyā verse is preceded by the word *ye yajāmahe*, and it is very possible that it is merely a development from it: but at least in the Rigveda there were series of such verses composed. The Puronuvākyās seem to have been later in development, though some may be seen in the Rigveda. In their place often are found longer recitations such as accompany the main offerings of the Soma: there is a peculiarity in the verses thus used which suggests that the ritual in its development still retained traces of its older form. In the hymns used are inserted Nivids, apparently also called Madas, which are invitations to the god with an enumeration of his titles to come and intoxicate himself with the Soma. These Nivids, as they are preserved to us, are of undoubtedly later composition than the hymns of the Rigveda, but it is perfectly reasonable to believe that in principle they represent the oldest form of the invitation to the gods.² We may conceive a time when the Nivid and the mere formula *ye yajāmahe* represented the whole of the words of the Hotṛ, but we have no clear ground on which to trace the precise development of the form of the ritual.

v1.c27.s7.40.3

The Adhvaryu in his turn has a certain number of formulae, normally in prose, to repeat as the several acts of the sacrifice proceed, in order to avert evil and invoke prosperity, but his main duty must have at first been, and even in the later ritual was, the management of the practical part of the offering, the preparation of the cakes and the straining and purifying of the Soma, the arranging of the many utensils, and the actual pouring of the offerings in the fire appropriate to each. In this work he had the constant aid of the Agnīdh, whose name denotes him as specially concerned with the kindling of the fire. This priest with the Adhvaryu, the Hotṛ, and the Brahman to oversee it all, managed many of the lesser offerings, and he was specially in these cases concerned with the keeping of fire burning, but naturally did much else beside. The position in which he stood to the Adhvaryu is neatly shown by the procedure, which was gone through before the Hotṛ said his Yājyā verse: he must be told to do so by the Adhvaryu, but before this takes place the Adhvaryu must address the Agnīdh with the words, ‘Om: make him hear’, to which the Agnīdh replies solemnly, ‘Be it so. Let him hear’. The episode is deliciously significant of the absurdities of the developed ritual.³ The close union of the two priests is perhaps the explanation of the two Adhvaryus in the list of priests already mentioned, though in the later tradition the second was the Pratiprasthātṛ.

v1.c27.s7.41

¹ Cf. Foy, *ZDMG.* l. 139; Wackernagel, *Altind. Gramm.* i. 41, 177 (for *vakṣat*, ‘may he bear’).

v1.c27.s7.42

² Cf. Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², p. 387; *ZDMG.* xlii. 242 ff.

v1.c27.s7.43

³ Hillebrandt, *Neu- und Vollmondsopfer*, p. 94; *Rituallitteratur*, p. 99.

v1.c27.s7.44

These priests sufficed for the new- and full-moon offerings, but for the animal offering the Hotṛ required an assistant, the priest called variously Upavaktṛ, Praçāstṛ, and Maitrāvaruṇa. The first two names indicate his chief activity in the ritual, the giving of directions, called Praiṣas,¹ to the priests, and this function he already exercised in respect of the Hotṛ as early as the Rigveda. The ritual prescribes that he should give to the Hotṛ his Praiṣa for the recitation of the Yājyā, standing before him on the right hand of the Hotṛ’s seat, holding a staff, slightly bent forward. Moreover, at the animal sacrifice he shares the Hotṛ’s duties, often, when there are verses to be recited, taking the one and the Hotṛ the other.² In the case of the Soma sacrifice he has recitations of his own to perform, in large measure directed to Mitra and Varuṇa, from whom therefore he borrows his third name as ‘(The priest) connected with Mitra and Varuṇa’, and, as the root whence comes the name Praçāstṛ, ‘orderer’, is an appropriate term for the commands of these gods, the human priest may have borrowed this designation from the gods themselves, though this is rather conjectural.³ What is much more certain is that the two divine Hotṛs, of whom we hear in the Rigveda, are the heavenly representatives of the Hotṛ and the Maitrāvaruṇa.

v1.c27.s7.45

¹ For a collection see Scheftelowitz, *Die Apokryphen des Ṛgveda*, pp. 142–55.

v1.c27.s7.46

² Schwab, *Altind. Thieropfer*, p. 90.

v1.c27.s7.47

³ Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², p. 391.

v1.c27.s7.48

In the Soma sacrifice lie the functions of the Potṛ and the Neṣṭṛ, who are included in the Rigveda list. The Potṛ is in the actual ritual a mere shadow, of no consequence or importance, whose former importance may be judged from his name and his obvious connexion with Soma Pavamāna. The Neṣṭṛ is also in the later ritual a priest with but one function of any interest or importance. It occurs in the course of the Soma rite, when an offering is made to Agni with the wives of the gods. The Agnīdh, who in this case has to partake of the Soma, sits in the lap of the Neṣṭṛ, and thereafter the Neṣṭṛ summons the wife of the householder, who then performs with the Udgātṛ a rite which is a mimicry of cohabitation and whose nature as a fertility spell was as clearly recognized by the ritual texts as by us.⁴ The suggestion⁵ that the rite is a barbarous one, and that the Neṣṭṛ is an intrusion into the Vedic ritual from a non-Vedic source, is clearly an error, and ignores the fact that fertility magic is looked upon by primitive peoples with very different eyes from those of the present day.

v1.c27.s7.49

⁴ TS. vi. 5. 8. 6; ÇB. iv. 4. 2. 18.

v1.c27.s7.50

⁵ Hillebrandt, *Ved. Myth.* i. 250, 261, n. 2.

v1.c27.s7.51

The remaining priest in the list of seven is the Brahman. It is uncertain exactly who is meant by this term, but the greatest probability is clearly that it is the Brāhmaṇācchaṅsin of the later ritual, who is also addressed as Brahman and whose older name was clearly Brahman.⁶ His duty in the later ritual is to be an assistant of the Hotṛ, and at the Soma sacrifice to recite a litany for Indra. The alternative view, that of Geldner,⁷ takes him to be in the Rigveda already the priest charged with the whole of the supervision of the ritual, and it is possible, though not certain, that already in the Rigveda¹ in the latest parts such a priest was known. In the later ritual his place is one of the highest importance: he is set off against all the other priests as equal in value to the whole of the rest of them: he says very little, and is mainly engaged in supervision seated in the place of the Brahman near the chief fire altar, by his silent meditation repairing every flaw in the sacrifice. The later nature of the office is also reflected in the tradition that the Vasiṣṭhas alone were the owners of a certain litany,² which has to be spoken by the Brahman at the offering: this points to the tradition of an invention in one family, which led in course of time to the gradual adoption of the use of such a priest by all the families.

v1.c27.s7.52

⁶ KÇS. ix. 8. 11.

v1.c27.s7.53

⁷ *Ved. Stud.* ii. 145 ff. For Henry’s theory of the Brahman as the primitive magician whence develops the priest see below, Chap. 22, § 8.

v1.c27.s7.54

¹ x. 141. 3.

v1.c27.s7.55

² TS. iii. 5. 2. 1; Macdonell and Keith, *Vedic Index*, ii. 7.

v1.c27.s7.56

In the list of seven there is no mention of the Hotṛ's counterparts, the Sāman singers, but they are elsewhere mentioned in the Rigveda, and the names of the Udgātṛ and Prastotṛ are mentioned,³ so that the omission of the Pratihartṛ may be merely accidental. The songs of the Sāman singers are of a really primitive kind,⁴ in that they are made up with all sorts of meaningless syllables interjected among the words, in order presumably to fit them to the music of the song: the comparison of the chant to the revival ceremonies of American negroes is too attractive to be disregarded. The chants fall into two classes, those addressed to Soma Pavamāna, which are the chants that they must first have been expected to sing: they differ in form markedly from the ordinary hymns of the Rigveda, and are also differentiated by their position in book ix. In addition to these, however, they chant songs for the ordinary gods, to whom the libations are offered at the three pressings of the Soma: the ritual demands a precise parallelism, each recitation of the Hotṛ being preceded by a chant, and the chant and recitation being closely allied by the use in the chant of sets of verses of the recitation. The arrangement is artificial and not early, as the inaccuracies in the ritual⁵ prove, and the absurdity of the theory of correspondence is proved by the case of the songs to Soma Pavamāna which have no real connexion at all with the recitations of the Hotṛ, to which they are alleged to be a parallel.

v1.c27.s7.57

³ RV. viii. 81. 5.

v1.c27.s7.58

⁴ Cf. Bloomfield, VOJ. xvii. 156-164; JAOS. xxi. 50; Oldenberg, GGA. 1908, pp. 711 ff.

v1.c27.s7.59

⁵ Weber, *Ind. Stud.* x. 374, n. 3; 385, n. 1.

v1.c27.s7.60

The evidence clearly does not allow us to say whether the Sāman singers were, or were not, present in the earliest form of the Soma sacrifice: the absence of their names from the Avestan list and the list of the seven Hotṛs might be cited in support of such a view, but at the same time the argument could not be pressed: the songs might easily have been chanted by some other priest—as by the Potṛ—before the Sāman singers came into existence.

v1.c27.s7.61

The later ritual requires only the Adhvaryu for the Agnihotra offering performed daily; for the piling or establishing of the fire, Agnyādheya, four priests, Hotṛ, Adhvaryu, Āgnīdhra, and Brahman; for the four-month offerings also the Pratiprasthātṛ; and for the animal sacrifice the Maitrāvaruṇa and Çamitṛs as aiders of the Adhvaryu. For the Soma sacrifice it prescribes sixteen, who are arranged as Hotṛ, Maitrāvaruṇa, Achāvāka, and Grāvastut; Adhvaryu, Pratiprasthātṛ, Neṣṭṛ, and Unnetṛ; Udgātṛ, Prastotṛ, Pratihartṛ, and Subrahmaṇya; and Brahman, Brāhmaṇācchaṅsin, Potṛ, and Āgnīdhra. The whole arrangement¹ is, however, artificial and worthless: the three assistants of the Brahman and the Neṣṭṛ in practice are reckoned rather with the Hotṛ, and the aim at sets of four has spoiled the natural order. The Kauṣītakins curiously enough had seventeen priests, a view not approved by the other schools, which naturally saw no need for a priest who was merely to sit in the Sadas at the sacrifice,² a function clearly sufficiently provided for by the Brahman who had nothing else to do.

v1.c27.s7.62

¹ Weber, *Ind. Stud.* x. 143 ff.

v1.c27.s7.63

² Generically as in TS. vi. 5. 1. 4 a group of priests bears the term Sadasya, but to them the Kauṣītakins added another.

v1.c27.s7.64

In this ritual we find the fully developed form of what is already known to the Rigveda, the choosing of the priests by the offerer, who must satisfy himself as to their capacities, if for no other reason than that, while he attains the fruit of the sacrifice, all the errors of the priests fall upon him, so that they can if they like ruin him at any moment by making deliberate blunders, as the Brāhmaṇas tell them how to do if they so wish. In their turn they are entitled to ask the sacrificer questions and to make sure that he is a proper person to sacrifice for, and that other priests have not already been engaged in the offering and left it unfinished by reason of disagreement with the sacrificer. The point is of interest, as illustrating how firmly organized the Brahmans were on the best trade-union models. The sacrificer must be of the three highest castes; exceptions are of the rarest character, and mainly concern the makers of chariots, Rathakāras, who seem to have occupied at quite an early date a peculiar position, not included in the third caste but still distinctly superior to the Çūdras, a fact which suggests that they were of inferior origin to the three castes, but by skill too important and useful to be neglected.³

v1.c27.s7.65

³ Macdonell and Keith, *Vedic Index*, ii. 203, 204. A classical example of disagreement between priests and sacrificer is recorded in AB. vii. 27; Macdonell and Keith, *Vedic Index*, i. 120.

v1.c27.s7.66

The evidence, however, is somewhat confusing. We find in Āpastamba⁴ a form of words prescribed at the new- and full-moon offering in the case of a Çūdra, where it seems that we are expected to see in the Çūdra either a Rathakāra or a Niṣāda, two special classes permitted a share in the sacrifice. A Çūdra appears also at the Pitṛmedha in the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa,⁵ and it is permitted to eat food from a carpenter (*takṣan*), who, of course, is closely allied to the Rathakāra. Āçvalāyana⁶ permits the carpenter to establish the sacred fire, and Bharadvāja expressly says that some permit this to the fourth caste, while others do not.⁷ The later theory⁸ makes the Rathakāra to be the son of a Vaiçya by a Çūdra mother. On the other hand Āpastamba¹ expressly contemplates any of the first three classes including in its ranks Rathakāras, which certainly seems an artificial view, in view of the comparatively late period of that Sūtra. The Niṣādas who appear occasionally as permitted to have some concern in the sacrifice are reckoned by the ancient authority Aupamanyava as a fifth class, and they have some claim to be regarded as members of the pre-Aryan population who remained in a less dependent condition than the Çūdras, presumably retaining their own tribal organization under the suzerainty of Aryan princes.²

v1.c27.s7.67

⁴ i. 19. 9.

v1.c27.s7.68

⁵ xiii. 8. 3. 11; MS. ii. 4. 1; KS. xii. 10.

v1.c27.s7.69

⁶ ii. 1. 13.

v1.c27.s7.70

⁷ See Caland's tr. of ĀpÇS., p. 186.

v1.c27.s7.71

⁸ BDS. i. 17. 6.

v1.c27.s7.72

¹ v. 3. 19. Cf. Bühler, SBE. xiv. p. xxxviii.

v1.c27.s7.73

² Yāska, *Nir.* iii. 8.

v1.c27.s7.74

In the later ritual the chief duties of the sacrificer himself were of an inferior type: he had certain formulae to repeat, he might perform the manual throwing of the offering in the fire, and he had various restrictions to undergo: his wife was in the same position, but her part in the rite was rather smaller than her husband's: she was, however, clearly considered throughout to be concerned in the sacrifice, and a formal place is provided for her at the Soma sacrifice and still more clear is her participation in other offerings. The sacrificer had, however, the most important duty of dividing the sacrificial fees, or Dakṣiṇās, so called either from the literal fact that the gifts, usually of cows, were placed on the right side for the sacrificer to divide, or because the word Dakṣiṇā from its literal sense had come to mean acceptable.³ This duty is prescribed in precise terms with regard to the several offerings, and there is often an obvious attempt to make the reward fit the service which has taken place in respect of the nature of the gifts given, e.g. a black beast for an offering for the dead. It must remain doubtful to what extent we may not see in the Dakṣiṇās the alteration of the older practice of offering the things given at the sacrifice: the priests determined to keep them, and converted the sacrifice into gifts to themselves.

v1.c27.s7.75

³ Macdonell and Keith, *Vedic Index*, ii. 203, 204; Bloomfield, *Religion of the Veda*, pp. 71 ff.

v1.c27.s7.76

Of the additional priests at the Soma sacrifice none have much importance or interest: the Subrahmaṇya was introduced because of a particular formula only,⁴ with which has been compared the Bahrām Yašt of the Avesta, and the Achāvāka is of special interest only because he is so obviously an introduction when the ritual was well defined, as is practically admitted in the Brāhmaṇas and in the ritual itself.⁵

v1.c27.s7.77

⁴ ÇB. iii. 3. 4. 18; AB. vi. 3; TB. iii. 8. 1. 2; ṢB. i. 1; KB. xxvii. 6; Oertel, *JAOS.* xviii. 34 ff.; Hillebrandt, *Ved. Myth.* iii. 209 ff., 298; Charpentier, *Kleine Beiträge zur indoiranischen Mythologie* (1911).

v1.c27.s7.78

⁵ KB. xxviii. 4–6 AB. vi. 14. 8.

Linked texts (21)