Historical Vedic religion

• 1. Introduction

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  Historical Vedic religion was practiced across the Punjab and the western Ganges plain for roughly a thousand years, from around 1500 BCE to 500 BCE. It left behind a body of sacred texts still considered scripture today, rituals still performed in Kerala and coastal Andhra, and a set of ideas about cosmic order that would eventually become the philosophical bedrock of modern Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. But the religion that seeded all of this was strikingly different from any of those traditions. It had no concept of reincarnation. It placed ancestor worship at its centre. And its chief deity, Indra, was a god borrowed from a culture the Indo-Aryans had encountered long before they reached India. How did a faith forged on the Central Asian steppes travel thousands of miles, absorb foreign gods and ritual vocabulary, and then transform itself so completely that its descendants would barely recognize the original? That question runs through every chapter of what follows.

• 2. Steppe Origins

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  The Sintashta culture of the Eurasian Steppe, dated roughly 2200-1750 BCE, is where the earliest roots of Vedic religion are traced. Out of Sintashta grew the Andronovo culture, dated roughly 2000-1150 BCE, and the Indo-Aryan peoples descended from these steppe communities. Their religious beliefs were closely related to what scholars reconstruct as Proto-Indo-European religion, and the parallels stretch across Eurasia. The Vedic god Indra, for instance, corresponds in part to Dyaus Pitar, the Sky Father, and has equivalents in Zeus, Jupiter, Thor, and the Slavic deity Perun. The deity Yama, lord of the dead in Vedic tradition, is thought to be related to Yima of Persian mythology. These are not coincidences. They reflect a shared inheritance carried across the steppe by peoples who spoke related languages and practiced related rites. The Old Indic language of the Rig Veda even appears in northern Syria in the oldest known inscriptions, at the location of the Mitanni kingdom, where kings took Old Indic throne names and used Old Indic technical vocabulary for horse-riding and chariot-driving. The Old Indic term r'ta, meaning cosmic order and truth and the central concept of the Rig Veda, was used in the Mitanni kingdom as well.

• 3. The BMAC Encounter

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  Before the Indo-Aryan tribes reached the Indian subcontinent, they passed through the territory of the Bactria-Margiana culture, known as the BMAC, which flourished in the region south of Central Asia between roughly 2250 and 1700 BCE. This contact reshaped Indo-Aryan religion in ways that can still be counted. According to the scholar Anthony, the Old Indic religion probably emerged among Indo-European immigrants in the contact zone between the Zeravshan River, in present-day Uzbekistan, and present-day Iran. It was a syncretic mixture of old Central Asian and new Indo-European elements. At least 383 non-Indo-European words were borrowed from the BMAC culture into Old Indic, including the name of the god Indra and the word for the ritual drink soma. Indra himself absorbed many of the qualities of the Indo-Iranian god of might and victory, Verethraghna, through this contact. He became the subject of 250 hymns, a quarter of the entire Rig Veda. Soma, the sacred stimulant drink perhaps derived from Ephedra, also likely came through the BMAC religion. His rise to central prominence, Anthony notes, was a peculiar trait of the Old Indic speakers specifically, not shared by their Iranian cousins.

• 4. Ritual and the Sacred Fire

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  The rituals of the historical Vedic religion were elaborate, expensive, and highly specialized. Fire was the central medium. The Agnihotra, an oblation to Agni the fire god, served as a sun charm. The Agnicayana was the sophisticated piling of the fire altar. The Darshapurnamsa were new and full moon sacrifices. The Soma rituals formed their own elaborate cycle, encompassing rites with names like the Jyotishtoma, the Agnishtoma, and the Atiratra. On the grander scale, the Ashvamedha was a horse sacrifice dedicated to the glory, wellbeing, and prosperity of a kingdom or empire. The Rajasuya was a royal consecration. The Atharvaveda added another dimension entirely: its rituals and charms concerned medicine and healing practices. Even funerary practice was codified within the tradition. A late Rigvedic verse, from book 10, invokes forefathers both cremated and uncremated, suggesting that both rites coexisted within the same religious culture. The Nambudiri Brahmins of Kerala have preserved and continue to perform these ancient Shrauta rituals into the present day, making them one of the living links to the Vedic period.

• 5. The Brahmanism Shift

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  Around 1000 BCE, as Indo-Aryan peoples moved east and settled as farmers in the Ganges basin, the Vedic religion began a transformation. This later form is called Brahmanism, and its ideological home was the Kuru-Panchala realm. The word Brahmanism was coined by the Portuguese writer Goncalo Fernandes Trancoso, who lived from 1520 to 1596, and for centuries it was used in English simply as a synonym for Hinduism. Brahmanism incorporated non-Vedic religious ideas, added post-Vedic texts like the Dharmasutras and Dharmasastras, and gave commanding importance to the priestly Brahmin caste. The early Upanishads, composed in the late Vedic period, introduced Absolute Reality speculation, wrestling with the concept of Brahman as that which existed before the creation of the universe, which constitutes all existence, and into which the universe will dissolve before endless creation-maintenance-destruction cycles begin again. Critically, it is in the late Vedic texts, including the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad dated to around 800 BCE, that the earliest versions of the Karma doctrine appear, alongside the first real discussion of reincarnation. These ideas had no place in the earlier layers of the Rig Veda, which instead emphasized an afterlife and ancestor worship through rites like the Sraddha, the offering of food to the dead.

• 6. Competing Traditions

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  The eastern Ganges plain was governed by a different Indo-Aryan complex, one that rejected later Brahmanical ideology and gave rise to Jainism and Buddhism. Jainism carries references to 22 prehistoric tirthankaras, and peaked in its classical form at the time of Mahavira, traditionally placed in the 6th century BCE. Buddhism, traditionally dated from around 500 BCE, declined in India over the 5th to 12th centuries in favor of Puranic Hinduism and Islam. The non-Vedic Shramana traditions that produced these movements were not direct outgrowths of Vedism. Scholars describe them as reflecting the cosmology and anthropology of a much older, pre-Aryan upper class of northeastern India. The period between 800 and 200 BCE is identified by the scholar Muesse as the classical period, when traditional religious practices and beliefs were reassessed and Brahmins and their rituals no longer commanded the prestige they had held during the Vedic period. Brahmanism adapted by incorporating the non-Vedic religious heritage of the eastern Ganges plain and local religious traditions. The resulting synthesis is what is recognized today as classical Hinduism, which scholars like Michaels date from roughly 200 BCE to 1100 CE.

• 7. Living Traces

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  Michael Witzel, historian and Sanskrit linguist, has argued that some rituals of the Kalash people of northwest Pakistan contain elements of the historical Vedic religion, though with differences, including fire placed next to the altar rather than in it as Vedic practice prescribed. Witzel has also suggested that Shinto, the native religion of Japan, carries some influences from the ancient Vedic religion, a claim that stretches the map of Vedic diffusion far beyond its recognized territory. Within India, communities in Kerala and Andhra Pradesh have preserved portions of historical Vedic practice, and the complex Vedic rituals of Shrauta are still performed there. The ethical concepts of the original religion have also survived in recognizable form. The term satya, evolving through the Vedas and later sutras into a virtue meaning truthfulness and consistency with reality in thought, speech, and action, remained a guiding concept across centuries of religious change. The term rta, defined as fixed or settled order and divine law, gave rise to the later concept of dharma in Brahmanical thought. Both words trace back, through the Avestan cognate asha, to a proposed Proto-Indo-Iranian root meaning truth, connecting the hymns of the Rig Veda to a religious vocabulary that was already ancient when the Indo-Aryans first entered the Indus valley.