What an excelent description of the Brahmanical practices of the Vedic period!
I should add that Vedic mythology is not-so-organized (then again, we could say the same thing for other mythologies): I mentioned for example that Indra, Agni, and Uṣas are the offspring of Dyava-pṛthvī, but Indra (along with Varuṇa and Mitra) is also said to be one of the
Ādityas, sons of the goddess
Aditi, and Agni, being fire, is also described to be immortal - being reborn day after day - and is also said to be an offspring of either the waters (a Vedic water deity named
Apām Napāt ‘grandson of waters’ is also sometimes described as a fire god - in fact, Agni and Apām Napāt are sometimes also conflated with one another) or two kindling sticks. Whilst they are the children of Dyauṣ and Pṛthvī and thus brother and sister, Uṣas and Agni are at times described as lovers (since the sacrificial fire is kindled during dawn), but Uṣas is also said to be the wife of Sūrya, whose path she opens.
There is also the issue of
devas and
asuras. Whereas in later Hinduism (and in Buddhism as well) the two groups are distinguished from one another, with the devas as being the ‘good’ low-tier gods and the asuras as their evil ‘demonic’ (although not exactly analogous to the Judaeo-Christian conception of what a demon is) rivals, there was still no such clear distinction in early Vedic religion. In fact, it would seem that
asura was more of a designation for deities who preside over abstract moral and social concepts, while a
deva is a deity who presides over natural phenomena. For example, Varuṇa, Mitra, and Aryaman (still another solar deity and one of the Ādityas, who presides over marriage oaths) are asuras, while Indra and Agni are devas. But even then, deities who are described as
asuras in one instance are also called
devas in another and vice versa (Indra, for example, was also called an
asura and is said to have been given the
asura power to slay Vṛtra!), so even this description is not totally accurate.
We can note an interesting similarity to Zoroastrianism here (not surprising since Vedism and Zoroastrianism
share a common root, ultimately deriving from
Proto-Indo-European religion - which is also the ancestor of Greco-Roman and Germanic paganism). In Zoroastrianism, the title
ahura is applied to the gods (
yazata) Ahura Mazda, Mithra (Vedic Mitra), and
Apąm Napāt (also a water god like the Vedic version), while the term
daeva is for deities that are to be rejected because they are misled by “the lie” (
druj).
As for sacrificial rituals: the sacrificial act (
yajna) performed by expert brahman priests served as the core of the Aryan religion. Oblations included ghee (clarified butter), milk, grains and soma (although when it no longer became available, a substitute), which are cast into the sacrificial fire with the chanting of hymns. Early Vedism also performed animal sacrifice: the most famous one is the
Aśvamedha, the horse sacrifice which could only be conducted by a king. In this ritual, a horse was consecrated, and accompanied by the king’s kin and other warriors, allowed to roam where it would for a year (or half-year). Anyone who should stop the horse is ritually cursed, and wherever it trod, the sovereignty of its master must be proclaimed - hence, if it went into neighbouring provinces hostile to the sacrificer, they must be subjugated. At the end of the year, the horse, along with other animals, are bound onto stakes and then ritually slaughtered, and the chief queen then has to copulate (or mimic copulation) with the dead horse, while the other queens ritually utter obscenities. Finally, the horse’s flesh is then roasted and offered to the gods. At the conclusion of the sacrifice, the priests who performed the ritual are then rewarded with a part of the booty won during the wandering of the horse.
Another Vedic yajna is the
Puruṣamedha (“human sacrifice”), which resembles the Aśvamedha in many respects, in that the people from all classes and of all descriptions were tied to the stake and offered to Prajāpati, the ‘lord of creatures’ and the Vedic god of procreation and life. While the
Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa implies that the ritual was symbolic (since the victims are supposed to be released unharmed), many scholars theorize that human sacrifice did occur at an early stage before being disavowed.
By means of the Purusha Nârâyana (litany), the Brahman priest (seated) to the right (south) of them, praises the men bound (to the stakes) with this sixteen-versed (hymn, Rig-v. X, 90, Vâg. S. XXXI, 1-16), ‘
The thousand-headed Purusha, thousand-eyed, thousand-footed…;’–thus (he does) for the obtainment and the securing of everything, for everything here consists of sixteen parts, and the Purushamedha is everything: in thus saying, ‘So and so thou art, so and so thou art,’ he praises and thereby indeed magnifies him (Purusha); but he also thereby speaks of him, such as he is. Now, the victims had had the fire carried round them, but they were not yet slaughtered,–
Then a voice said to him, ‘Purusha, do not consummate (these human victims): if thou wert to consummate them, man (
purusha) would eat man.’ Accordingly, as soon as fire had been carried round them, he set them free, and offered oblations to the same divinities, and thereby gratified those divinities, and, thus gratified, they, gratified him with all objects of desire.
). Varuna, while he was more of a god of an abstract concept in Vedic mythology, became associated with water, and still is today. Savitr totally disappeared: he is only remembered today mainly because his name appears in the famous