Yajna

Summary

The yajña is the Vedic sacrifice: the sacrificer pours butter, lays food and pours Soma juice into the fire, the fire carries it to the gods, and the gods come and sit on the grass spread around the fire. The whole Rigveda opens with it: "I laud Agni, the chosen priest, god, minister of sacrifice, the hotṛ.. Agni, the perfect sacrifice which thou encompassest about verily goeth to the gods". Another hymn says: "We choose Agni the messenger, the herald.. wake up the willing gods, since thou, Agni, performest embassage: sit on the sacred grass with gods". In the sacrifice Agni is both priest and messenger: he calls the gods to the place and carries to them what is offered.

The fire is kindled by friction, as a hymn says: "Here is the gear for friction, here tinder made ready for the spark.. we will rub Agni in ancient fashion forth", calling him "the first ensign of the sacrifice to eastward". The fire is then divided into three: the householder's fire, gārhapatya, the source, from which fire is carried to two other hearths, the offering fire, āhavanīya, in the east, and the southern fire, dakṣiṇāgni. The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa says the offering fire is the head of the sacrifice, the head being the fore-part, and tells that when the gods chose Agni for their hotṛ he said: "I am not equal to this, to be your hotṛ and carry your oblation; you chose three before me and they have passed away: restore them to me", and they restored them, and they are the three enclosing sticks laid round the fire.

In the sacrifice Soma is pressed, filtered and poured for the gods: "In sweetest and most gladdening stream flow pure, O Soma, on thy way, pressed out for Indra, for his drink".

The hymn of Puruṣa makes creation itself a sacrifice. When the gods spread the sacrifice with Puruṣa as their offering, spring was its butter, summer its fuel and autumn its oblation. From that great sacrifice the dripping fat was gathered, and from it came the birds and beasts, the verses and chants, horses, cattle, goats and sheep; his mouth became the Brahmin, his arms the warrior, his thighs the Vaiśya, his feet the Śūdra; the moon came from his mind and the sun from his eye. The hymn ends: "With the sacrifice the gods sacrificed to the sacrifice: these were the earliest holy ordinances".

The idea the yajña turns on is that the world came out of a sacrifice, so that the sacrifice people offer every day repeats that first sacrifice and keeps what came out of it. People give the gods from the food in their hands, the fire carries it, and the gods come, sit, eat and give. The first priest in all this is Agni, the fire in the house, which is why all the fires start from the householder's fire.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the Hindu essay does not read the word: yajña comes from the root yaj, to worship and offer, with the noun suffix -ña, as in Avestan yasna. The root yaj is Arabic ḥajj and Hebrew ḥag. Lane says ḥajja means he repaired to an object of reverence, and then came to mean going to the House and performing all the rites, and Brown–Driver–Briggs says Hebrew ḥag is the festival gathering, the pilgrim feast, and also the festival sacrifice itself, as in Psalm 118:27, "bind the festal sacrifice with cords to the horns of the altar". So the word joins the gathering to the god and the offering made to him, which is what the yajña is. The j is Arabic j, which is g in Hebrew as it was in old Arabic.

Linguistic Root

Monier-Williams gives yajña as "worship, devotion, prayer, praise", then "act of worship, offering, oblation, sacrifice", the former meanings prevailing in the Veda and the latter after it, and the root yaj as "to worship, adore, honour (esp. with sacrifice or oblations)", setting beside it Avestan yaz and Greek hagnos, hagos and hazomai.

So the reading covers the root yaj alone. Two things bring it close to ḥajj: the sense, since both words join the going to a god, the feast and the victim; and the first letter in Greek, since the Greek words Monier-Williams sets beside the root begin with h, where Arabic and Hebrew have ḥ, followed by g, where Arabic has j. The limit of the reading is that Sanskrit and Avestan begin with y, and the Greek h in these words comes regularly from an older y, so the Semitic ḥ is matched only by the Greek.

Key Mythic Narratives

Agni who is in the fire

The Hindu Semitic essay reads the name Agni as ajja and ajīj, the blazing fire whose sound is heard, and makes him the one who "delivers the offerings to the gods". The Vedic sacrifice rests on that office: there is no sacrifice without fire and no fire without Agni, which is why he is invoked first in every sacrifice and praised in the first hymn of the Rigveda. See Agni.

Symbolic Reading

The Hindu rereading essay reads the coming of the classes out of Puruṣa's body, head, arms, thighs and feet, as meaning that all the classes are needed like the limbs of a body, and that the order was at first a division of labour. The hymn places that division inside the sacrifice: the whole society is a share of one victim, and no limb stands without the others.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Avestan yasna is the same word, and in Zoroastrianism it is the central rite, performed every day in the morning watch, centred on the preparation and drinking of haoma, and opening with invocations that bring the divine beings with their powers into the sacrificial precinct, first Ahura Mazdā, then the Aməša Spəntas, then the fire Ātar. So the Indian and Iranian sacrifices share the name, the fire and the pressed drink, and part in that Zoroastrianism made the fire itself the object of reverence. Encyclopaedia Iranica, "Yasna"; see Ātar.

Greece has the story of how the first sacrifice was divided: gods and mortals met at Mecone to settle a dispute, and Prometheus cut up a great ox, setting the flesh and inner parts for men hidden in the paunch and for Zeus the white bones dressed in shining fat; Zeus chose the fat and was angry when he saw the bones, "and because of this the tribes of men upon earth burn white bones to the deathless gods upon fragrant altars". The Greek sacrifice draws the line between gods and men by two portions; the Vedic one goes back to a sacrifice that made the whole world.

In the North there is the blót: people slaughter cattle and horses, sprinkle the blood on the altar, the temple walls and themselves, cook the meat and eat it together, and drink toasts to Odin and other gods. The Vedic sacrifice sends the gods' share to them through the fire, while the blót gathers gods and people round one pot, which is why the farmers insisted that King Hákon eat with them. Saga of Hákon the Good 16–19; see blót.