Alternatively, certain descriptions one would expect to be used only of the supreme being are applied to more than one deva or devī, indicating that though there are differences of identity on the surface, deeper down they share unity of being. Here are some examples. RV. 1.35 is a hymn to Savitṛ. In verse 3 he is described as ‘driving away all dangers’ (apa viśvā duritā bādhamānaṣ); in verse 5 we are told that ‘all peoples and all beings abide forever in the embrace of heavenly Savitṛ’ (śaśvad viśaṣ savitur daivyasyopasthe viśvā bhuvanāni tasthuṣ). These are attributes we ascribe to the Supreme Being. In RV. 2.12, a hymn of praise to Indra, the following attributes occur: he is ‘the foremost, the inspired’ (prathamo manasvān), ‘who once begotten [as Fire] overcame/encompassed the devas by his wisdom’ (...devān kratunā paryabhūṣat; verse 1). Indra is the one ‘in whose control (pradiśi), are horses, cattle, the people and all chariots’; it is ‘he who produced (jajāna) the Sun and Dawn, who is the guide (netā) of the Waters’ (verse 7), and so on. Or consider RV. 7.86, the hymn to Varuṇa we have quoted earlier. It was Varuṇa, says the poet, ‘who has fixed in their stations the heaven and the earth ... who has spread out the earth down below’ (yas tastambha rodasī cid urvī ... prapathac ca bhūma; verse 1); he is supplicated to grant release from one's own misdeeds as well as from wrongdoings perpetrated by previous generations (verse 5). But in 6.72.2, the poet declares that it was Indra and Soma who ‘propped up the sky with a supporting pillar, and spread out Mother earth in all directions’. Thus properties one would attribute in more conventional monotheisms to a single deity, are shared out in the Ŗk Saṃhitā among more than one deva or devī, depending on who is being lauded at the time. The examples given here are far from exhaustive;we have hardly grazed the tip of the iceberg. These hymns belong within the confines of the same text;they are part of the same universe of discourse;they are expressions of a shared theology. And, again and again, one finds in this theology that sovereign qualities attributed in one place to one divinity are elsewhere attributed to another.
This distinctive Vedic approach had been noticed early in the study of the Veda. As the scholar S. Dasgupta observed, ‘This peculiar trait of the Vedic hymns Max Müller [1823–1900] has called Henotheism or Kathenotheism: “a belief in single gods, each in turn standing out as the highest ... This god alone is present to the mind of the suppliant; with him for the time being is associated everything that can be said of a divine being – he is the highest, the only god, before whom all others disappear, there being in this however, no offence or depreciation of any other god”’ (S. Dasgupta 1969:18). Where we differ from these early scholars is in our interpretation of this fact. But let us proceed further in our inquiry into Vedic plurification in order to bring this point to a conclusion.
There are also numerous instances of ‘polymorphism’, a tendency closely related to the trait just discussed. Here a deva or devī is viewed as manifesting in more than one form, viz. in either a different form(s) of its own, or a form(s) generally associated with some other deity. We can give a representative example, taken from RV. 8.58.2: ‘One only is Fire (Agni) though kindled manifoldly’, declares the text, ‘one only is the Sun (Sūrya) who has pervaded the universe;one only the Dawn (Uṣas) who shines over all this. Indeed, this One (ekam) has become everything’.12 It seems reasonable to take the first three sentences as declaring that Agni, Sūrya and Uṣas are each essentially one, though they appear variously in some way. But the final sentence seems to collapse this pluriformity further into an encompassing One, indicating that Agni, Sūrya and Uṣas are different forms of this one Source (note that Fire, Sun and Dawn are themselves different forms of light).
Here we have done no more than give an indication of the way the various Vedic poets viewed the subjects lauded in their compositions. But it seems clear even from this brief overview that these subjects, these devas and devīs, existed, not as isolated entities, but, by way of mutual entanglement and effacement, in a single nexus of being. They were nodal focuses in an ontological grid through which they shared power and manifested variously. And, the poets go on to hint, the Source of this grid is a single reality, the One, of which the divine focuses are themselves manifestations. It seems as if the incomplete anthropomorphism relating to the devas and devīs of the earlier hymns lent itself pre-emptively to some theological merging or collapsing process that allowed a One to emerge later (albeit nebulously) as their single source. As if to endorse this understanding, we do find in the later material, that is, in books 1 and 10, fairly clear evidence of this development.
So the poet muses in RV. 10.129, famous now as ‘The Hymn of Creation’ (Nāsadīya Sūkta):
There was neither non-being then, nor was there being,
No firmament existed, nor the space beyond.
What did it encompass? Where? Under whose protection?
Did the waters exist, impenetrable, profound?
There was no death then, or immortality,
No trace of night or of day.
That One breathed without breath on its own,
Other than it there was nothing whatever.
(verses 1 and 2).13
Cumulatively, we must conclude that this is not a ‘polytheistic’ theology, at least not in the sense often applied to the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome. Rather, this is an incipient form of polycentric monotheism. ‘Monotheism’ because eventually and with growing explicitness, a single source of worshipful being is acknowledged as underlying or encompassing the numinous focuses that comprise the devas and devīs, and ‘polycentric’ because these focuses coexist as an ontological web, though each could also function as a somewhat centrifugal centre of worship in its own right. Further, the ‘human’ composite face of this One (that which the worshippers were led to see and experience, its anthropomorphized features), though it had a shadow side – the potential irascibility, even wrath of Indra and Rudra, for example, their martial and sometimes crafty and lustful characteristics, the fearfulness that they and others could generate, the stern judgment that Varuṇa could mete out – was on the whole, accessible, shining, wise, benign, ready to assist humans in need if they played their part.14 Not a bad start in the recorded religious history of the subcontinent.15
This is but one expression of what I have called polycentrism, but there are other forms of this distinctive decentring tendency which we shall notice in the course of this book. This is why we are dwelling at some length on the Veda here: not only to see how a tradition of orality that was to abide indefinitely emerged, but also to note how this tradition reveals for the first time a tendency that distinguishes and binds, and provides threads of continuity that enable us to mark out the phenomenon we call ‘Hinduism’.
So much then for belief. Now to the practice of Ŗg Vedic religion at the heart of which lay the sacrificial ritual.
It is sunrise; a group of men are standing above a rounded firepit and chanting poetic rhythms. Near the firepit, outside a boundary, the sound of women pounding rice is interspersed with the hymns. Every few verses end with the sound ‘svāhā’. The men pour an amount of ghī or clarified butter from a wooden bowl, and the fire flares up suddenly. Next to the firepit is a long glistening pole wrapped in yellow, rubbed in an oily substance. The entire scene is a medley of light: the sunrise, the fire, the golden butter, and the yellow pole. The priests are reciting hymns to Agni, the fire god, comparing him to the sun, which is rising now and casting light all around. Their hymns are also likening him to the color of the butter being cast into the pit, making a spectacle of sparks and smoke. Later the rice that the women have pounded will be shaped into balls of rice-offerings, making the arena a place of eating as well as offering for the priests and for the community as a whole.
When did this scene occur? It could have occurred in 1500 B.C.E., at a time when the Vedic corpus of mantras was used in sacrifice ....
(Patton in Mittal & Thursby 2004:37)
It is not known wh
at the earliest forms of this ritual were, but in time (perhaps by about 1500 B.C.E. as stated above, or even earlier) this sacrificial practice or yajña had become a codified performance to which Ŗg Vedic hymns were applied in elaborate ways by groups of priests (sometimes about 17 in all) who specialized in the performance of this ritual. ‘Sacrifice’ has the basic connotation of ‘making sacred’, of ‘setting apart’, through an act of giving up or renouncing something for a specific purpose. Since this act was so important, it came to be the centre of an elaborate performance. This necessitated the codifying of the hymns used in the rituals – in this context the hymns were called mantras – in two further collections called the Sāma Veda or Saṃhitā, and the Yajur Veda or Saṃhitā.
The Sāma Veda has two divisions; the first consists of hymns, all but 75 verses or so of which were taken from books 8 and 9 of the Ŗk Saṃhitā; the second division consists of notated chants (Sāmans) to which these hymns were set, clustered in groupings called gaṇas. The verses of the Sāma Veda were sung, ‘mostly during the Soma ritual, in a very elaborate fashion, including much coloratura [vocal embellishment of the melody] and often nonsensical stobhas (such as the string hā o hā o hā hāyi or bhā, dada, hup). They are the earliest preserved music of India’ (Witzel ibid.:76).16
The Yajur Veda, on the other hand, contains mainly prose but also some verse formulas (yajurs), which were muttered by the priest to accompany the bodily movements of recitation.17 There is a fourth Saṃhitā called the Atharva, but its content sets it apart from the other three. Though in parts it is very old, perhaps as old as the Ŗg Veda, and though it has a number of beautiful poems, some invocatory, others dealing with death, funeral rites and stages of life, etc., it has a large number of earthy verse-spells for protection against life's problems such as fevers and sicknesses, enemies, sorcery, snake-bites, bad dreams, etc., and also to bring about certain objectives, e.g. the goodwill of others, victory in battle, success in love, health in cattle, good crops and rain, virility, and good standing in society. Some scholars have seen the Atharva Saṃhitā as generally recording the more populist practices of Vedic society. Glucklich (2008: Ch. 8) expatiates on this point, indicating connections between Ŗg Vedic hymns and various spells and charms from the Atharva Veda for everyday pragmatic purposes.18 It seems that this side of the Atharva Saṃhitā was the reason why at first it was not accorded an authority equal to that of the other three Saṃhitās. In early strands of Hindu thought, the Ŗg, Sāma and Yajur Vedas are sometimes grouped together without mention of an Atharva collection.19 But in the second half of the first millennium B.C.E., the concept of ‘the four Vedas’ (catur-vedāṣ) as an authoritative bloc took hold, in so far as the Atharva Veda had been made to follow the same pattern of textual development as that of the other three Vedas. We will discuss this development presently. But because the earliest sections of the Sāma and Yajur Saṃhitās do not contain substantial innovative conceptual material, and because the tone of the Atharva Veda is in general so different, scholars have turned overwhelmingly to the Ŗg Veda, i.e. the Ŗk Saṃhitā, with its evocative hymns, as being the prime source for discerning the origins of Indo-Aryan religion in the subcontinent.
Note, however, in light of our concerns in this chapter, that with all the vocal and formulaic embellishments recorded in the Sāma and Yajur Vedas, the verses of the Ŗg Veda would not have made much sense when uttered during the sacrifice. The sense of the words would have been hard if not impossible to discern for an onlooker. It was not the kind of ‘meaningful’ performance one could expect, say, when hymns or psalms are sung in a Christian Church. But where the Vedic ritual was concerned, this kind of meaning was not quite the point. The point was that by their intoning and mutterings and extended chanting of the text, accompanied by the bodily movements, the Vedic priests were establishing resonances, connections, a measure of equilibrium, between the higher cosmic powers and their world so as to carve out a viable existence for themselves and their constituencies in a potentially hostile and unpredictable environment. The human microcosm was settling into its proper place. The collective priestly performance of the texts – the regulated utterances and stylized bodily movements – did that (after all, the divine subjects of the hymns could be expected to grasp their meanings ...). It is in this context that the concept of dharma or right order was developed; this we shall come to in due course. Thus, while the ancient Greeks and Romans were producing accounts of battles and kingdoms – in short, developing a sense of history’ – the ancient Hindus were exploring the intricacies of sound and utterance which, in the space of a few centuries, was to flower in the creation of sophisticated grammatical and semantic texts. The launching of these two different trajectories of intellectual endeavour was to have abiding consequences for their respective civilizations.
The developed sacrificial ritual, also called the solemn ritual to distinguish it from non-solemn rites such as rites of passage etc., was not conducted in a permanent temple or building built for the purpose, but in an open rectangular space about the size of a small field. This usually contained the three main fires, lit in hollows of different shapes20: the gārhapatya fire (Agni as represented by the fire of the hearth), the āhavanīya (the Fire of the offering, which empowered the priests and into which the offerings were made), and the dakṣiṇa (the ‘southern’ Fire which warded off evil forces; these tended to come from the southern point of the compass, hence south is not an auspicious direction). In the centre of the plot of land were smaller spaces where Soma could be pressed; at other places the presiding priests took up their positions as also the sponsor or patron of the sacrifice and his wife.
There were different forms of the solemn ritual, some performed daily to mark the transition of the day, and others performed at broader intervals of time to mark turning points in the passage of the year. Thus the agniṣṭoma, a Soma sacrifice, took a day to perform, with offerings of Soma made in the morning, at mid-day, and at twilight (but other Soma sacrifices could take more than a year to complete).21 The agnihotra ritual ‘marked the morning and the evening of each day; the darśapūrṇamāsa was the new and full moon offering; and the seasonal sacrifices marking spring, rainy season, and autumn were called the cāturmāsyāni or four-month offerings’ (Patton ibid.:41). Such marking of time engendered close attention to the heavens, to the movements of the stars and other celestial bodies, and to various astrological and astronomical calculations. In time this led to widespread reliance among Hindus on astrology and horoscopes, a preoccupation that remains strong, even among educated people, to this day. There were other, more specialized, Vedic sacrifices.22
The offerings generally made in the solemn ritual ranged from clarified butter, rice balls or mash, barley cakes, corn and curds to various animals (e.g. goats and cattle).
The fire god (Agni) carries the offerings to the gods. Fire also transubstantiates the offerings, not simply by a conversion from a raw, uncooked state into a palatable, cooked one but also by one from a mundane substance into one with divine characteristics ... As such, ‘food’ travels towards the gods in the form of smoke and aroma (medha) and is consumed by them. The remains here on earth are a return gift of the gods who have tasted the food while sitting at the sacred fire, soiled it by their spittle and rendered it consumable only by their socially inferior relations, the human beings: this is the remnant (ucchiṣṭa), greatly extolled ... The gods also give other return gifts to [humans], e.g. rain, sons, food, long life – the standard wishes of a Vedic Indian.
Apart from the gods, the ancestors and the ancient sages and poets, the Ŗṣis, are part of the system of exchange as well. Offering to all of them is regarded as delivering oneself from the innate ṛṇa [or] ‘debt, obligation’ that is inherent to all [human beings].
(Witzel ibid.:78)23
We shall see in a later chapter how this idea of offering food to the divinities, which is then returned for human profit, became transformed later into that of prasāda d
uring the rituals of image-worship of the deity (pūjā).
Belief in the devas and devīs, that is, in invisible realities or powers that manifested physically, was accompanied, as one could expect, by a belief in a vital principle or inner self of the human being that survived death. This post-mortem self was not some kind of wraith, but the continuation in some way of the individual personality. When a person died, the body was usually cremated, since the consuming work of Agni, deathless himself, both purified and transported to another realm. There is no unambiguous evidence of a belief in reincarnation in the Saṃhitās. This teaching seems to have developed later in the tradition. Though the theology of death and post-mortem existence for humans is fragmentary and complex in the early Veda (there being no clear philosophically-derived position, of course, by the nature of the text), the final goal seems to have been a sharing in the happy immortality and friendship of the devas and devīs, and in a glorified embodiment, as in the case of these divine powers.
Yama, the lord of death (mentioned about 50 times in the Ŗg Veda, with three hymns devoted to him), ‘is not, properly speaking, a God, but a Man ... the first Man to cross to the realm of the beyond ... a hero who [has run] before us and shares with us both the human condition and the divine calling’ (Panikkar 1977:544–5). He is invoked to help humans attain his state. The celestial goal, the realm of the righteous, may well have had different levels, the highest possibly reserved for those who were generous benefactors of the sacrifice, battle-heroes, performers of great austerities, and so on. The joys of this heavenly realm (later known as svarga), in which there is no sickness or sorrow, are described in terms of heightened forms of human satisfaction and are, unsurprisingly, rather male-oriented. There does seem to be a grisly side to death, though, in some passages. There are demons, flesh-eating ghouls and other evil entities, and sparse references to a realm of darkness if not to a final dissolution that evil-doers incur. But there is even less comment on such a hellish end than on the heavenly state. As Panikkar observes:
Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (The Library of Religious Beliefs and Practices) Page 8