The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27.s7.26

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