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This chapter provides an overview of the general genres of early Vedic India, including Śrauta, or formal ritual texts; Grhya, or domestic ritual texts; and Vidhana, or “magical” ritual texts. The Śrauta Sutras acted as manuals or ritual handbooks, compiled to give directions to those performing public rites in Vedic times. The manuals for the rituals in different stages of domestic life are contained in texts called the Grhya Sutras. The Vidhana literature consists entirely of viniyogas, or the applications of Vedic mantras, outside the sacrificial situation entirely. The Vidhana literature is characterized by its emphasis on the personal ambition or desire of the reciter; its emphasis on japa, or soft recitation of the mantra; its belief that the mantra can be efficacious without necessarily being accompanied by a rite; and the attendant emphasis on visualization—through both mental and physical imagery. The chapter further discusses the śakha, or institutional branch of Vedic interpretation.

The ideal war elephant was a mature male, with large tusks, in the heightened hormonal state of combativeness called musth, having a driver on his neck bearing the two-pointed hook to restrain him, and warriors on his back. The kings of early civilizations (Egypt, Assyria, Mesopotamia, China, the Indus Civilization) were drawn to elephants in ways that caused their decline. That was reversed by the invention of the war elephant, in late Vedic period India, about 1000 BCE

This classic essay by Hubert and Mauss was both an early contribution to Durkheim’s struggle to establish an academic discipline studying social phenomena and, for the authors, the start of a collaborative study of religious phenomena. A summary is offered of the very dense argument, which concentrates on comparing animal sacrifice in Vedic India and early Judaism. The essay emphasizes the variety within sacrificial practice and the potential incompatibility of sacrifice and totemism. It proposes an origin for sacrifice of a god (as in Christianity) rather than to gods, and having defined sacrifice as effecting communication between the sacred and profane, explores its function, which can for instance be one either of sacralization or of desacralization (the latter including scapegoat rituals). The essay is enriched by the authors’ introduction when they reprinted it in 1909, and the chapter ends with a selective account of more recent reactions to it.