Several significant themes run through these essays, though not necessarily evident in all of them. These include the interiorization of ritual. Although the psychologized character of contemporary society may lead us to presume that this means performing the ritual as a mental visualization, Indic religious culture gives greater emphasis to an embodied basis for such interiorization.119 This usually involves a psycho-physical symbolism, and in some cases includes equations between ritual actions and breathing, digestion, and sexual intercourse. Another theme, this one of value for tracing historical relations between different lineages of ritual practice are the categories of ritual functions, whether three, four, or five. These functional categories—protection, conquest, and so on—are directly coterminous with such matters as shapes of hearth, the colors used in the ritual, such as the practitioner’s garb, the time of day the ritual is to be performed, the direction that the ritual is to be oriented, the kind of wood to be used in building the fire, the selection of offerings to be made, and so on. The homa has several different kinds of broader applications to which it is put in different ritual cultures. Important are, for example, the consecration of images, use in building rites, and in some traditions as the final ritual in a larger ceremonial complex. In addition to the set functions and applications, practice of the homa is often taken to be conducive to liberation or awakening. Frequently, the symbolism involved includes the destruction of the practitioner’s attachments or obscurations by their identification with the offerings being made into the fire. Just as Agni consumes the offerings and purifies them so that they are acceptable to the deities, so the fire consumes and transforms the fetters binding the practitioner.
Methodologically, what emerged from listening to the presentations, and then reading and re-reading the written versions, is a set of three admittedly overlapping meta-methodological categories—symbolism and comparison, textually based studies, and descriptive studies. These divisions are only rough ones, in that textual concerns are common to most of the essays, just as both description and comparison are widely employed, along with attention to symbolism.
Taken cumulatively, these studies provide a wide-ranging overview of the homa across more than three millennia. Such rituals, which have extensive textual bases, histories of performance lasting across millennia, and traditions of performance active in the present, provide an important resource for understanding how rituals develop and change—within a particular tradition, as well as across the boundaries of religious traditions and, more broadly, across religious cultures.