Bringing the Gods to Mind: Mantra and Ritual in Early Indian Sacrifice

Conclusions: Laughter and the Creeper Mantra

Conclusions Laughter and the Creeper Mantra I am uncertain whether the perception Applied on earth to those that were myths In every various sense, ought not to be preferred To an untried perception applied In heaven. But I have no choice. Wallace Stevens, “Lytton Strachey, Also, Enters into Heaven” 182 At one point in the sattra of 1999, the year-long somayajña in Gangakhed, Maharashtra, it was an appropriate moment to perform the creeper or serpent mantra, the verses to the serpent queen, Sarparajñi (RV 10.189). As they chanted the mantra, the priests tied their dhotis one to another in a long line and move around the sacrificial arena like a creeping vine or snake.1 As the Aitareya Brahmana 5.23, as well as the Šañkhayana 10.13.26 and Ašvalayana Šrauta Sutra 8.13.3–6, states, all the different priests creep together, chanting the verses to the serpent queen: “This moving many-colored one has come; he has sat down before his mother in the east, and goes on to his father heaven.”2 Despite its cosmic solemnity, in 1999 the procedure erupted in howls of laughter as the priests moved around, occasionally tumbling over as they chanted, righting themselves to find the right place, and then moving forward again. This was a case where the metonymic juxtaposition between mantra and its referent was self-created; there needed to be a creeper to refer to, and so there was, a human made one. The irony and the sense of humor about the interpretive act of being a creeper gave the performers a sense of lightness about their task and an acknowledgment of the constructed nature of their metonymic endeavors in linking word and meaning. The laughter of the mantra to the queen of snakes, with everyone creeping, impossibly tied to one another, struck me in a powerful way: such juxtapositions between word and act, the viniyogas of Vedic performance , can be self-conscious and creative human acts of interpretation . They can act not simply as mechanical equations (the earlier understanding of magic), but as frameworks of possibility, suggestions for creating a world. It is time to gather up the threads and return to all the viniyoga-makers—the businessman in Varanasi chanting the Gita, the priests chanting the serpent mantra, and the hotr chanting before the birds at sunrise. What can they tell us more broadly about early India, about ritual, about poetry? The case studies give rise to a number of insights that might add a new, small strand of thought, and a slightly different kind of intellectual history, to the huge tapestry of Vedic interpretation that has been woven over the centuries. On the Changing Role of Recited Canon In my previous work, I commented on the ways in which narrative itself, particularly narratives about the compositions of Vedic hymns, could act as a form of canonical commentary. There was a great debate in early Indological scholarship about where the Rg Vedic hymns belonged. This was called the “itihasa/akhyana controversy”: Were the narratives attached to Vedic hymns the “original” framework from which the hymns emerged, or were they later accretions? The debate may never be resolved, but it brings up the role of the shape of the canon, and how it is inserted into our daily lives. The case studies here show the ways in which ritual application, too, can be an index for changing attitudes to canon. As I suggested throughout , in this mode of “ritual commentary,” a part of an oral text is associatively linked to the whole of an action, thus confirming and imagining that action as it is being performed. In this sense commentary is not simply a discursive act, but rather a deeply formative one, ritually constructive of persons, of actors who comment. It is a kind of “commentary of action.”3 As Rene Gothoni puts it, “Religious commentary is the intellectual activity containing unceasing re-reading, reflecting and reviewing the testimonies of sacred traditions. . . . In this form of activity, commentary becomes a faculty to be cultivated.”4 Thus, as we have done in the Vedic case of applying mantras about eating, enemies, eloquence, traveling, and attaining another world, we are no longer simply analyzing magical compositions. We have perConclusions 183 formed a history of those selective principles by looking at the metonymical process involving the same image over time. This is...