Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/48

The Religion of the Veda power controlled and guided by the wonderful tech- nique of the priests, and their still more wonderful insight into the meaning of all the technical acts. A crowd of priests-seventeen is the largest number -conduct an interminable ceremonial full of sym- bolic meaning down to its smallest minutia. The priests seat themselves on the sacrificial ground strewn with blades of sacred darbha-grass, and mark out the altars on which the sacred fires are built. They handle and arrange the utensils and sacrificial substances. And then they proceed to give to the gods of the sacrifice, each his proper oblation and his proper share. Even the least and most trivial act has its stanza or formula, and every utensil is blessed with its own particular blessing. These stanzas and formulas, to which a description of the rites is more or less directly attached, make up the numerous redactions of this Veda. 32 The Yajur-Veda is a later collection in the main, though it contains much substance that is old, old enough, indeed, to be prehistoric. But like all other Vedic collections, its redaction, at any rate, pre supposes the Rig-Veda. A good many verses of the Rig-Veda reappear in the Yajur-Veda, usually not in the exact form of the Rig-Veda, but taken out of their connection, and altered and adapted to new ends which were foreign to the mind of the