Chapter 83. Sacrifice and Its Masters: Vedic Ritual, the Brahmanas and the Priestly Order

The Vedic hymns were not freestanding poetry. They were the spoken part of a sacrificial system, and the people who controlled that system came to hold a position in Indian society that no other priesthood has kept so long. This chapter treats Vedic religion as a ritual technology. It covers the four Vedas and their classes of priests, the fire and soma sacrifice, the Purusha hymn that grounds the four varnas in a primordial sacrifice, and the Brahmana texts that made ritual the engine of the cosmos. It then follows the sources as they describe how ritual expertise became social and political power, and how the same ritualists began to turn the sacrifice inward, preparing the ground for the Upanishads.

Four Vedas, four priests

Debroy writes that the Vedas were once called trayi, “three”. The Atharva Veda “is believed to have been a later addition to the sacred canon”. Each Veda has a samhita of mantras and Brahmanas that “explain the hymns and indicate how these are to be used in sacrifices”. Together these form the karma kanda, while the Aranyakas and Upanishads make up the jnana kanda. He assigns each Veda to a class of priest at the yajna. The hotri “invoked the gods by reciting the mantras” and used the Rig Veda. The udgatri chanted the Sama Veda, and the adhvaryu “carried out sacrificial rites while chanting” the Yajur Veda. The fourth class, “brahmana overseers”, “supervised the sacrifice and the hymns of the Atharva Veda are for this class of priests” [Debroy, The Rig Veda, #82390, Introduction].

Van Voorst describes the Yajur Veda as “mostly … prose sacrificial formulas” and the Sama Veda as songs whose words come mostly from the Rig Veda. The Atharva Veda, “containing mostly spells, curses, and charms in 731 hymns”, “reflects the everyday religious life of ordinary people just as the threefold Veda reflects the religious life of the priestly group” [Van Voorst, Anthology of World Scriptures, #63227, “Overview of Structure”]. Ferrara sees the Atharva Veda as “a backlash against the aristocratic elitism of the Rig Veda cult” that “most directly preserves ancient shamanistic rites” [Ferrara, Sacred Bliss, #66945, ch. 1].

The Purusha hymn and the origin of the varnas

The social charter of the system is RV 10.90. In Van Voorst’s selection the gods “spread the sacrifice with the Man as the offering”, and “His mouth became the Brahmin; his arms were made into the Warrior, his thighs the People, and from his feet the Servants were born” [Van Voorst, #63227, Rig-Veda 10.90]. Debroy’s retelling puts the ritual canon itself into the same act: “From the sacrifice emerged the mantras of the Rig veda, Sama hymns, Various metres and the mantras of the Atharva Veda and the mantras of the Yajur Veda as well.” It continues: “From the mouth of the purusha were born the learned brahmanas. From his arms were born the brave kshatriyas. From his thighs were born vaishyas and from his feet were born the shudras (a servant or slave class)” [Debroy, #82390, “Purusha”]. Armstrong reads the hymn as non-agonistic. The Purusha walks “of his own free will into the sacrificial ground” and lets the gods kill him; “there was no fighting in this sacrifice”, and so, she argues, the hymn “laid the foundation for India’s Axial Age” [Armstrong, The Great Transformation, #82303, “The Axial Peoples (c. 1600 to 900 BCE)”].

Walsh notes that the four varnas appear “only in one late Rig-Vedic hymn”. The terms karma, dharma and reincarnation are absent from the Rig Veda. These categories, she writes, developed as the Indo-Aryans settled on the Gangetic plain, where they “explained and justified the social and economic divisions of Gangetic society in terms of an individual’s good or bad conduct in former lives” [Walsh, A Brief History of India, #38599, chs. 1–2]. She adds that “the term caste comes from the Portuguese word casta”, first used in the sixteenth century, and that the indigenous terms are varna (class) and jati (birth group) [Walsh, #38599, “Caste, Varna, and Jati”].

The Brahmanas: sacrifice as cosmic technology

Van Voorst calls the Brahmanas “manuals for sacrifice”. They present “ritual utterance, the powerful sacrificial word correctly spoken” as “the power that strengthens the gods, keeps the universe intact, and brings blessing to the sacrificer”. “The power of the priesthood steadily grew in Vedic times”, and “the focus of the Brahmanas is on sacrifice itself, not on the gods” [Van Voorst, #63227, “Historical Origin and Development”]. He sets RV 1.1, “I pray to Agni, the household priest who is the god of the sacrifice”, beside the Agni-Brahmana 1.1–19. In that text “Prajapati alone existed here in the beginning … He generated Agni from his mouth. Because he generated him from his mouth, therefore Agni is a consumer of food. Truly, he who knows Agni to be a consumer of food becomes himself a consumer of food.” Van Voorst comments that “the god Prajapati is the precursor of Brahman” [Van Voorst, #63227, “Devotion to Agni in Prayer and Sacrifice”]. Ferrara makes the point more sharply. “Since the gods were thought to owe their divine positions, and very existences, to the sacrificial act”, he writes, the ritual system “furthered the machinations of a priestly class eager to advance its own agenda” [Ferrara, #66945, ch. 1].

The largest of these texts, according to the reference shelf, is the Shatapatha Brahmana (“Brahmana of one hundred paths”) of the White Yajur Veda, attributed to the sage Yajnavalkya. Wikipedia calls it “the most complete, systematic, and important of the Brahmanas”, with detailed explanations of ritual “including construction of complex fire-altars”. Keith places it linguistically in the 8th–6th centuries BCE and Parpola around 700 BCE, and its fourteenth book “constitutes the Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad” [Wikipedia: Shatapatha Brahmana].

Walsh’s account of the horse sacrifice (ashvamedha) shows how ritual served kingship. A royal stallion roamed for a year with the king’s armies demanding tribute behind it. It was then killed, and the chief queen lay beside it in a sexual rite that Walsh quotes from a Brahmana. The rite was in use “well into the sixth and seventh centuries A.D.” [Walsh, #38599, “The Horse Sacrifice”].

Ritual power as political power

Armstrong describes the early sacrifice as a potlatch-like contest between rajas, with drinking, gambling, chariot races and mock battles that “could easily segue into serious fighting”. A king’s office depended on the annual rajasuya, in which he had to lead a successful raid and win at dice [Armstrong, #82303, “The Axial Peoples (c. 1600 to 900 BCE)”]. The Agni rites sanctified conquest: “one becomes a settler when he builds the fire altar” [Armstrong, #82303, “The Axial Peoples (c. 1600 to 900 BCE)”]. Walsh’s chapter “Caste, Kings, and the Hindu World Order (1000 B.C.–A.D. 700)” opens with Manu: “If the king did not tirelessly inflict punishment … the stronger would roast the weaker like fish on a spit.” It shows how texts fixed the varna order. Brahmans performed the sacrifices and kept the texts, and Kshatriyas protected society. Later law codes and Puranic genealogies tried “to fix” kings of non-Kshatriya origin into the scheme [Walsh, #38599, ch. 2]. She quotes the Chandogya Upanishad: those of good conduct attain “the birth of a Brahman, or a Kshatriya, or a Vaisya”, and the evil “the birth of a dog, or a hog, or a Chandala” [Walsh, #38599, “Karma and Reincarnation”].

The British historian Charles Allen puts the institutional result bluntly: “The Brahmin caste remains to this day the oldest and longest-lasting closed shop in history.” He locates “the real Saraswati River and the original Arya homeland” in the north-west [Allen, Coromandel, #65507, ch. 2 “The Knowledge”].

Reform from within: interiorising the sacrifice

Armstrong’s thesis is that the ritualists themselves dismantled the violent rite. The reformers of the Brahmana period “belonged to the Brahmin priestly class, which had risen to new prominence during the late Vedic period”, and their work “was preserved in the Brahmanas, technical ritual texts compiled between the ninth and seventh centuries”. They “were motivated by the desire to eliminate violence from the sacrificial rites”: “there were to be no more competitions, chariot races, mock battles, or raids”, and the patron “would henceforth be the only warrior or vaishya present”. Prajapati became “the archetypal sacrificer”, who conquers death by taking it into himself so that “Death has become his self (atman)”. “The ritual reformers were pioneers. They redirected sacrifice from its original orientation, and focused instead on the creation of the atman, the self” [Armstrong, #82303, ritual-reform section, “Brahmanas”].

The brahmodya links ritual and philosophy. “A ritual often ended with the brahmodya competition to find a verbal formula that expressed the mystery of the brahman … reduced to silence, he was forced to withdraw.” Through “the impotence of speech” the participants sensed brahman [Armstrong, #82303, “The Axial Peoples (c. 1600 to 900 BCE)”]. Renouncers took the reform further. One rite “internalize[d]” the sacred fire before the renouncer left the village, and “the renouncer regarded his brahmacarya as a higher form of sacrifice” [Armstrong, #82303, “Kenosis (c. 800 to 700 BCE)”]. At the threshold of the Upanishads the Chandogya meditates on Om: “As all leaves are held together by a stalk, so all speech is held together by Om.” In Armstrong’s reading the chant was “one with the human body, with the atman, with breath, speech, ear, eye, and mind” [Armstrong, #82303, “Knowledge (c. 700 to 600 BCE)”]. Walsh adds that animal sacrifice “w[as] abandoned over the centuries beginning with the Upanishads and later in response to Buddhist and Jaina criticisms”, and that cow protection grew out of this [Walsh, #38599, “Holy Cow”].

Western reception and the Iranian parallel

Max Müller’s Cambridge lectures are an example of the nineteenth-century frame. He describes his life’s work as “the publication of the text and commentary of the Rig-veda, the most ancient book of Sanskrit, aye of Aryan literature”. In the Veda, he says, “an ancient city has been laid bare before our eyes”, in which to read “the thoughts of our true ancestors, before they had become Hindus, or Persians, or Greeks, or Romans, or Celts, or Teutons, or Slaves” [Müller, India: What Can It Teach Us?, #78088, lectures “The Lessons of the Veda” and “Veda and Vedanta”]. Walsh records how this philological family later became the basis for racial politics [Walsh, #38599, “Into or Out of India”].

The soma–haoma parallel connects this chapter to Parts 1–2. Moulton writes of “conclusive evidence that Haoma was known and banned by Zarathushtra himself”. He suggests that the original plant “failed the people as they migrated westward”, which led to later substitutes [Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, #55011]. Ferrara sets “Vedic soma rites and Zoroastrian haoma rituals” side by side as religion that “must be experienced directly”, and notes that the Vedic fire sacrifices “have correlates in the Mithraic and Zoroastrian traditions” [Ferrara, #66945].

Key points

• Debroy assigns each Veda to a priest. The hotri recites the Rig Veda, the udgatri chants the Sama Veda and the adhvaryu performs the Yajur Veda rites, while the Atharvan “brahmana overseers” “supervised the sacrifice”.
• RV 10.90 derives the four varnas and the mantras themselves from the sacrifice of Purusha. Walsh notes that this is the Rig Veda’s only reference to the varnas.
• Van Voorst describes the Brahmanas as “manuals for sacrifice” in which the correctly spoken word sustains gods and cosmos, and the Agni-Brahmana makes Prajapati the source of Agni.
• The Shatapatha Brahmana, attributed to Yajnavalkya, is the fullest Brahmana. Its last book is the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.
• Walsh shows ritual and law codes fixing the varna order and kingship. Allen calls the Brahmin caste “the oldest and longest-lasting closed shop in history”.
• In Armstrong’s account, Brahmin reformers removed violence from the rite, focused it on the atman and led into the brahmodya’s silence and the Chandogya’s Om.
• Müller’s lectures show the “Aryan” philological frame of nineteenth-century Western scholarship. Moulton and Ferrara draw the soma–haoma parallel.