Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  The extraordinary and rather sudden elaboration of a complex ritual system focusing on the Kuru rajan, but now with a priesthood organized to provide elaborate support to the rulers, gives evidence of a situation where political administration was rudimentary and ritual carried the brunt of providing social integration. As Erdosy points out, “We may recall that a reliance on religious sanction in preference to brute force is one of the distinguishing criteria of chiefdoms.“72 No paramount chiefdom can, however, do without force, and the Kuru king “could exert his will by a ready band of `terrible [warriors]’ (ugra) or henchmen. He also relied on a network of spies.“73 But much of the burden of “taming” the ambitions of chiefs and subchiefs was taken over by the new ritual system. The constant raiding and fighting among the Aryan groups, even if it amounted to little more than cattle rustling, could now be channeled into competition for ritual status. As Witzel puts it:

  A not very wealthy Vaisya might have been content with the domestic (grhya) rituals of passage that are executed for him and his family. However, a lower rank Ksatriya might have attempted to go on to the next step on the socio-religious ladder and become a diksita, that is an initiated “sacrificer” (yajamana), and having learnt more of the Veda than a Vaisya … After he had established the three sacred fires, he could then perform the Agnihotra, the New and Full Moon sacrifices, etc. If he wished for more, he could add the seasonal rituals and the yearly Soma ritual. If he was still not content with this and wished to impress his rivals further (who would often come to interfere with or destroy his rituals), he could go on with seven more types of soma rituals … What is important here is that these-only natural-rivalries were cleverly channeled in the new, Srauta way of stratification …

  Beyond the Ksatriyas, the next level is that of the nobility of royal blood … A low rank ruler could receive the consecration as chieftain through the simple royal abhiseka … and finally, there was the solemn Srauta option of the rajasuya [royal consecration]. Later on a revised, complicated version of the Rgvedic, originally even Indo-European, horse sacrifice (asvamedha), was added for especially powerful supreme kings who claimed “world domination,” which nevertheless only encompassed parts of (northern) India. The new Srauta ritual thus put everyone in his proper station and at his proper place … There was opportunity for each and everyone to gain higher status by having the Brahmins perform more and more elaborate rituals-instead of simply raiding one’s neighbors.74

  The inner meaning of the rituals is something we must consider below, but the social function would seem to be manifest. The great Srauta rituals were displays of what Thorstein Veblen called “conspicuous consumption,” that is, displays through elaborate and very expensive ritual of the status of the sacrificer. Some have even compared this ritual system to the potlatch of the Northwest Coast Indians. Although the Brahmin class or order comes into its own in this new system, we should not forget that the rites were created for royalty and nobility. It would be a very rich Brahmin indeed who could act as sacrificer rather than priest in the most elaborate rituals.75

  The new society that was taking shape in the Kuru realm was headed by a king who was supposed to defend the good of all his subjects as well as the proper way of life (dharma) of each of them, but was in fact a sharp break with any remaining tribal egalitarianism. The four varnas were defined by functional differentiation, but even more by rigid hierarchy. The creator of this new kind of society and its chief beneficiary was the alliance between Ksatriyas and Brahmins (brahmaksatra), who quite consciously “ate” (the term for “dominate” or “exploit”) those beneath them. Our texts, composed by Brahmins, claim that they also “ate” the Ksatriyas, but at times admitted that the opposite was true.

  On the whole, this alliance, so advantageous to both its members, would persist through most of subsequent history. It is thus the whole social-ritual system with its dominant brahmaksatra class alliance that Witzel points to with the term “Sanskritization,” borrowed from the work of the anthropologist M. N. Srinivas, who used it to describe how castes in twentieth-century India could raise their status by imitating the practices of superior castes, copying their greater reliance on Sanskrit, the language of the sacred texts?? What Witzel calls “the first Sanskritization,” and he notes the irony of the term when used of speakers of Vedic Sanskrit, is the fact that the Kuru realm became a model whose influence rapidly spread throughout northern India.77 The Kuru realm was the largest and militarily strongest society of its day, but it was not primarily through conquest that its influence spread, but by example. The Kurus had created a pattern that, for all its inner conflict and apparent rigidity, could provide both social stability and resilience for generations to come.78

  The intellectual achievement of the Middle Vedic period would be influential for later history as well, though it would be overshadowed by later developments in a way that the fundamental Kuru socioreligious pattern would not. Before considering those later intellectual developments, and the sense in which they embody an axial transition, we must first give in outline what the state of religious thinking was by the end of the Middle Vedic period. In terms of the typology of this book, Middle Vedic society as exemplified by the Kuru realm was archaic, and thus its culture and religion were most likely archaic as well. That Middle Vedic culture as exemplified in the Brahmanas had the seeds of axial reflection I would concede; that it was already axial, as some have argued, I find hard to credit. But we must make an effort, however cursory, to understand this remarkable ritual system if we are to decide how to categorize it.

  The Ritual System

  We will take the Agnicayana sacrifice as exemplary of the whole system, not only because is it extraordinarily well documented in a 1975 performance by a film and in two enormous volumes thanks to Frits Staal and his associates, but also because it is one of the most comprehensive and important, and, as we have seen, one of the earliest of the great srauta rituals.79 It has also been proclaimed as the oldest surviving ritual in the world,80 and “as the pinnacle of Vedic ritual, [which] occupies a special position among the srauta sacrifices owing not only to its elaborateness but also to the fact that it contains many remarkable rites and ritual elements.“81 That this ritual has survived for 2,500 to 3,000 years in oral transmission and is still being accurately performed (Frits Staal found that the ritual he recorded differed only in minor details from textual descriptions that are very ancient), most recently in 2006, is something of a marvel. It is again a tribute to the fact that in India nothing is ever lost. What is remarkable about this survival, and is indeed without parallel in the world as far as I know, is that this ritual was created in a society that was just emerging from a paramount chiefdom into an early state, that is, barely archaic in terms of my typology.

  In one sense this ritual and the other great srauta rituals are typical of archaic societies in that they glorify the ruler and act to ensure his immortality. Though early Indic society knows no monumental architecture, no temples even of the sort that were built in Hawaii, we can see these gigantic rituals as the functional equivalent of the pyramids of Egypt, which were also built for rulers with the intent of ensuring their immortality. There is, however, one great difference: the rituals belonged to the Brahmins, not to the rulers, and could be performed, if sufficient resources could be found, by the Brahmins themselves if they had no royal patron. That tells us something about India that really is different from all the other cases.

  Jan Heesterman helps us see why this greatest of rituals focuses on fire:

  Agni, fire, is the central feature of the Vedic world. We hardly need to insist on this point: all of Vedic ritual, centered as it is on the fire cult, is there to prove it. Not surprisingly, then, fire is the focus of a deeply layered, many faceted imagery. To mention only some prominent points, fire, which prepares man’s food and carries offerings to the other world of gods and fathers, is both the center of the human world and the means for communicating with the ultramundane sphere. It is
the pivot in the cosmic circulation of the goods of life.

  Fire, then, stands for life, wealth, procreation, and the continuation of family, clan, and lineage. Hence the importance that is attached to the installation of the domestic fire and, even more to that of the separate fire for the solemn sacrifice … Not only are man and fire said to be father and son, but the relationship is reversible. In short, they are one, a unity that guarantees immortality. Against this background we can understand that the ritualistic concern with the fire borders on the obsessive, as appears from the elaborate casuistry regarding possible mishaps that may befall the sacrificial fire.

  However, this obsessive concern seems to point to something else, too. Fire symbolizes life and immortality, but its possession is far from secure. Not only can fire be dangerous and destructive when it gets out of hand and acts in its aggressive Rudra form, it is also notoriously fickle and ephemeral.82

  The Agnicayana (fire altar)83 ritual illustrates many of the points Heesterman makes, not least in that its very elaboration was an effort to control the fickle and ephemeral and bring fire to its fulfillment for human destiny. I have said that in early India there were no monuments. The fire altar is the exception that proves the rule. The altar that gives the rite its name is its most outstanding-and expensive-feature: it requires more than 1,000 bricks, handmade in several sizes and shapes, to form the bird-shaped fire altar that is the focus of the ritual. But, and this is equally significant, the fire altar does not become a monument, for it is abandoned after its first use, even though it took so much time and effort to construct. Again, Heesterman explains: “Even the prestigious brick altar does not provide permanence. After its use in the Soma ritual it is considered a cadaver, Agni’s dead body, as I was told by certain Nambudiris [the Brahmins who performed the 1975

  We can see in the Agnicayana many examples of the kind of thinking that characterizes Vedic thought: the correlations, homologies, similarities, and identities (the Sanskrit word is bandhu) that seem to provide the answers to most important questions. The ritual focuses on Agni, obviously, but Agni can, under certain circumstances, be identified with or substituted for other gods, as they can for him, and that happens in this ritual as we will see. But the fire altar itself, built of five layers of 200 bricks each, is in the shape of a bird: from above it resembles a falcon or eagle, in any case a bird of prey, with head, wings, and tail. And the bird, or the bird-shaped altar, is Agni. The adhvaryu priest, while carrying the fire from its prior location to the center of the fire altar, recites:

  It is said that Agni is the bird because a bird first brought fire from heaven, but there are other explanations. Multiple explanations go with multiple meanings, as is the case generally with ritual thought.

  Of central significance in the play of correlations is that the sacrificer (yajamana; sacrifice: yajna), the patron and beneficiary of the whole ritual is also Agni. So if the fire altar is Agni, it is also in very complex ways the sacrificer. It is the yajamana’s size that determines the size of the bricks for the altar: measurements are taken from the tips of his fingers, with his arms raised, to the ground, from the top of his head to the ground, and from his knees to the ground.16 These measures are divided and manipulated in ways too complex to describe here, but they provide the measurements for the several sizes and shapes of the more than 1,000 bricks that will make up the altar. This is another reason the altar can never be used again: another sacrificer will have different dimensions; the bricks will not be the same size.

  Staal writes, “The main altar of the Agnicayana functions in several respects as a tomb: the golden man and five heads of sacrificial victims are buried under it.“87 He speculates that early Vedic burial mounds may lie behind this aspect of the altar. The golden man is a small gold figure of a male human. This is appropriate because the altar, among other things, is a human being. The heads are those of a horse, man, bull, ram, and he-goat, the classic species for animal sacrifice, though in practice the he-goat was usually substituted for the other species.88 For the 1975 ceremony and probably for a long time previously, these heads were made of clay. However, there is some discussion in the early literature about how the heads, the human one in particular, were to be obtained. Some held that an actual human head, perhaps of someone who had died in battle, had to be used, but the possibility of human sacrifice cannot be ruled out. This whiff of the idea of human sacrifice, however, really indicates how very slight is the possibility that any large-scale human sacrifice, such as those in Hawaii or Shang China, was present in early India, and we may question why this common marker of early states is missing. Could it be that the ruler, the “king,” never quite achieved the ultimacy that he did in the other archaic cases because he has to share the highest rank to a significant degree with the Brahmins? Human sacrifice is the ultimate symbolization of the supremacy of the sacrificer. Perhaps the Indic king never attained that kind of supremacy.

  If the fire altar is Agni, a bird, the sacrificer, and a tomb, perhaps we will not be surprised to learn that it is everything: the cosmos and its contents. The altar is composed of five levels of 200 bricks each, with the top level containing a few more. The arrangement of the bricks in each level is slightly different, but not enough to impair the basic form of a bird. But one of the meanings of the altar is that the first, third, and fifth levels represent the three worlds-earth, air, and sky-of which the universe is composed (there will be more levels of worlds added later, but three is the basic number).89 And so the fire altar is Prajapati, who in Middle Vedic thought has become identified with Purusa, the cosmic man who appeared in RV 10.90 above, the one from whom the whole cosmos and all that is within it are derived. And again, Prajapati and Agni can be interchanged. Staal sums up the teaching of the Brahmanas as follows:

  According to Sandilya’s teaching in the Satapatha Brahmana, the construction of the Agnicayana altar is essentially the restoration of Prajapati, the creator god, who created the world through self-sacrifice, viz., through his own dismemberment. Since Prajapati became the universe, his restoration is at the same time the restoration of the universe. Thus, piling up the altar means putting the world together again. Just as Prajapati was the original sacrificer, Agni is the divine sacrificer, and the yajamana is the human sacrificer. The designation of the fire altar as Agni indicates the identity of Agni and Prajapati. Agni, Prajapati, and the yajamana are all identified with each other, with the offering altar, and with the fire installed on it.90

  It is this kind of thinking that drove the nineteenth-century Sanskritists to the point of despair: they could make no sense of it and found it childish and even silly.” But more recent Indologists have succeeded in retrieving a good deal of sense in it and conveying it rather effectively. Brian K. Smith makes a good case for the Brahmanas in his Reflections on Resemblance, Ritual, and Religion. He quotes Louis Renou as speaking of Vedic thought as “a system of equations,” but asks what kind of equations and for what purpose are they constructed.92 His answer is that Vedic thought is an effort “to correlate corresponding elements lying on three discrete planes of reality: the macrocosmos (whose contents and forces are collectively called adhidevata, `relating to the godly’), the ritual sphere (adhiyajna, `relating to the sacrifice’), and the microcosmos (adhyatman, `relating to the self’).“93 The correlations or equations (bandhu), however, are not made just for the sake of speculation. Vedic thought is in the service of Vedic action and operates under the assumption that “reality is not given but made.“94

  The fundamental premise is that creation (or procreation, or emissionPrajapati is not exactly a “creator god” on the model of Yahweh) is fundamentally “chaotic, disorganized and unformed.” Thus it is not creation that constitutes order, but sacrifice. Smith writes:

  It is characteristic-and perhaps close to definitive-of Vedism that between mere procreation on the one hand and true cosmogony and anthropogony on the other is inserted a set of constructive rituals. Between Prajapati’s creation
and the origin of the cosmos are sacrificial acts of the gods, giving form to formless nature. And between the procreation of every person and the origin of true being are also rituals, making a human out of the human in potens only. Cosmogony and anthropogony in Vedic ritualism are actualized only within the sacrifice and realized only by ritual labor or karman.

  For the Vedic priests and metaphysicians, ritual activity does not “symbolize” or “dramatize” reality; it constructs, integrates, and constitutes the real. Ritual forms the naturally formless, it connects the inherently disconnected, and it heals the ontological disease of unreconstructed nature, the state toward which all created things and beings perpetually tend.95