A long line of virtually naked men march the sand shore hauling a half-sunken barge upstream, pulling sluggishly but relentlessly with an over-the-shoulder rope fixed to the top of the mast. Within sight further upriver are more day laborers, blue-black skin glistening in the heavy sun
light. They are also skeletal in structure but immensely strong, struggling to carry a water-soaked tamarind trunk slung on vine-ropes up the steep levee toward a lumberyard. Washer folk stand thigh deep at the river’s edge end lessly slapping folds of cloth against flat stones. Altogether they provide rich tone poems to the music of the wide Godavari in scenes that an observer today notes would have been the same 3,000 years ago.
This chapter collects portraits of contemporary Vedic ritual life that, aston ishingly, are also some 3,000 years in age. When stalks of a green creeper are enthroned and worshipped as a king whose fate is to be pressed into soma juice and drunk by a sacrificer who then claims immortality, there is resonance in early Vedas of a thousand years before the Common Era. When sixteen priests line up in crouching postures to snake-crawl their way through the ritual ground, the hand of each on the shoulder in front, stealthy deer hunters stalking the very sacrifice they are conducting, there is witness to a mystery predating any histori cal text, perhaps even the Rg Veda. The same open-air altar is being constructed today as in ancient India; invitations go out to the same gods of earth, midspace, and heaven to join in the drinking of soma and feasting on roasted animals; and the same chorus of mantras floats on the air as in antiquity.
In order to appreciate these grand rituals, however, there must first be a review of the ritual life introduced in Chapter 2 and a more careful definition of the single-fire household and then extension of Agni into a three-fire sys tem and potential soma and animal sacrificial dramas. This chapter considers the crucial steps taken when Agni, lord of the household, becomes threefold, fivefold, a receptor of soma, and eventually the medium of transcendence and cosmic incorporation in the funeral ceremonies.
[[188]]
Mentioned in Chapter 2 was an important distinction between “pre-classical” and “classical” periods of Vedic texts and rituals. If one were to employ an “archeology” of Vedic tradition it would be the Vedic Sanskrit Brahmana texts and ritual Sutras that represent the “classical” rituals this chapter is about to explore. In the case of coastal Andhra this means primar
ily the Taittiriya Brahmana, its appended Aranyaka, and the Srauta Sutras of Apastamba supplemented by Baudhayana. These texts were composed largely in the period c. 800–500 bce, a middle portion of the first millennium bce.
Probing beneath them one would locate the “pre-classical” level of the Rg Veda, Atharva Veda, and other Samhitas such as the Taittiriya of the Krishna Yajur Veda, compiled c. 1200–800 bce. This stratum represents the Old Indo-Aryan speakers who entered India sometime after c. 1500 bce. Deeper still, stratigraphic analysis would reveal the level of an earlier Proto-Indo-Aryan-speaking culture, one with a different dialect, a people who may have called themselves Dasas. They were pastoral nomads who migrated to India c. 2000–1500 bce and fused with indigenous agrarian folk speak ing a non-Indo-European language and inhabiting the broad area east of the Caspian Sea to the Indus River, the region known to linguists and historians as the Bactria Margiana Archeological Complex (BMAC). The Dasas may have built the forts described in the Rg Veda. And there are suppositions that the singular Veda of melodies, the Sama Veda, may have originated with these people speaking a language outside the Indo-European family.
This archaic level may have included the Vratyas, “known for their unorthodox aggressive behavior and raiding habits” as Jan Heesterman noted in his studies of the agonistic and cyclical dimensions of pre-classical Vedic ritual. While this archaic culture left no texts that precede the Rg Veda, the much later classical rit
uals, the maha-vrata, asva-medha, pravargya, and vaja-peya, for example, do carry survivals from that remote era, including the influence of Harappan religion in the last phases of the Indus Valley civilization c. 1200 bce, in a continuing period of cultural fusion of non-Indo-European-speakers and Proto-Indo-Aryans. Of sig
nal importance to emergent Vedic religion is the *sauma cult of what appears to have been a mysterious plant, perhaps akin to ephedra, one that evolved into haoma for Indo-Iranian speakers to the west and soma for Rg Vedins in the cen turies prior to the middle of the second millennium bce. Some of these survivals from deep antiquity will be encountered in various segments of this chapter.1