The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27.s7.56

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.