Motilal Banarsidass Publishing House

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.