Essays on Vedic and Indo-European Culture

Essays on Vedic and Indo-European Culture

This book is about the cultural and religious patterns as these may be

reconstructed on a twofold basis: Vedic poets views as known from the

Rgveda and some old Indo-European literary sources examined in a

comparative perspective.

In its main bulk offers a novel approach to the Vedic theory of sacrifice

from the point of view of the Vedic priest as an individual social type

whose doing was conditioned by the conflict between the groups practising

sacrifice as well as the tension between the patron of the sacrifice and

the officiant. It also envisages the integration of the warrior into the

sacrificial ritual and suggests a solution to the problem of the daksina

(commonly called sacrificial priest’s salary) interpreted as a

materialisation of the relation between the priest, the gods invoked and

the patrons of sacrifice, the daksina’s function being to denote the value

of the poetic word in the prayer.

The book tackles also some particular issues in Vedic and Indo-European

religions: the typology of the warrior, the ‘cooking’ of the poetic word

linked to the double-entendre in Vedic poetry designed as a means to solve

the problem of the relative importance of the speech within sacrificial

ritual and of the food offerings to the gods; the early origins of the

yogic practice in Vedic times related to some Indo-European practices as

disclosed in Avestan, Hittite and Latin texts.

Review(s)

“…. an excellent comparative study of Veic and Indo-European culture. In

this age of global awareness of inter-cultural dimensions of human wisdom

this publication will prove to be of great importance.”

–Prabhuddha

About the Author(s)