Historical Vedic Religion

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Historical Vedic religion is the sacrificial religion practiced by the Indo-Aryan peoples of northern India in the period that produced the Vedas, conventionally dated between about 1500 and 500 BCE. It is the earliest stratum of religious life in the subcontinent for which texts survive, and the soil from which classical Hinduism grew — though the two are not the same, and much of what later became central was absent or marginal at the start. Scholars call it Vedism, or, for its later sacrificial elaboration, Brahmanism.

Almost everything known of it comes from one body of material: the four Vedas and the prose works attached to them. The Rigveda, the oldest, is a collection of hymns to the gods, composed and transmitted orally with extreme precision long before they were written down. Around it gathered the other three Vedas, the Brahmanas explaining the ritual, and finally the Aranyakas and Upanishads, in which the questions turn inward. This is a religion reconstructed almost entirely from liturgy and commentary; there are no temples to excavate and no scripture of narrative history, only the words of the rite and the speculation around them.

At its center stood the yajna, the fire sacrifice. Offerings — clarified butter, grain, the pressed juice of the soma plant — were given into the flames of Agni, the fire-god, who carried them to the other powers: Indra the warrior who slew the serpent and released the waters; Varuna, guardian of cosmic and moral order; Surya the sun; Ushas the dawn. The priests who performed these rites and preserved the hymns were the brahmins (brahmana priests), the forerunners of the later Brahmin class, and the exactness of the recitation was itself held to be efficacious. Many of these gods have transparent kin across the Indo-European world — Dyaus Pita beside the Greek Zeus and Roman Jupiter — and the comparison is one of the firmer results of historical linguistics rather than a matter of speculation.

The religion changed across its own long span. The early hymns address a wide company of gods directly; the later sacrificial texts grow preoccupied with the mechanics and cosmic power of the rite itself. In the Upanishads, composed toward the close of the period, the emphasis shifts again — from the sacrifice outward to an inquiry into the self (atman) and the underlying reality (brahman), and toward the doctrines of rebirth and release that would shape everything after. Whether this marks a break with the older sacrificial world or its inward continuation is a question on which the tradition’s own later schools, and modern scholars, have not fully agreed.

Several deities and gods of the Vedic age faded; Indra and Agni receded as Vishnu and Shiva rose to dominance, and the great public sacrifices gave way to image worship and devotion. Yet the Vedas were never discarded. They remained the authority later movements appealed to or defined themselves against, and their verses are still recited at Hindu rites today — the oldest continuously transmitted religious texts of the living world.

→ In the library: The Upanishads (Müller, 1884)

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