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The Religion of the Veda

has to befuddle himself with soma, in order to get the necessary courage to slay demons. He, and he alone, has in the Rig-Veda the epithet ṛeīshama, that is, "he for whom the sāmans are composed upon the the ṛks," or, as we should say, "out of the ṛks."[1] It seems likely that the Sāma-Veda is built up out of remnants of savage Shamanism – the resemblance between the words Sāman and Shamanism, however, is accidental. Shamanism, as is well known, attempts to influence the natural order of events by shouts, beating of tam-tams, and frantic exhortation of the gods. The Brahmans were in the habit of blending their own priestly practices and conceptions with a good deal of rough material which they found current among the people. The sāman melodies, too, betray their popular origin in that they seem to have been sung originally at certain popular festivals, especially the solstitial festivals.[2] The exclamations interspersed among the words of the text are likely to be substitutes for the excited shouts of the Shaman priests of an earlier time. It is perhaps worth while to note that in later Vedic times the

  1. ↑ See my articles, On Reishama, an Epithet of Indra, in Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. xxi., p. 50 ff.; and, The God Indra and the Sāma-Veda, in Vienna Oriental Journal, vol. xvii., p. 156 ff.
  2. ↑ See A. Hillebrandt, Die Sonnenwendfeste in Alt-Indien, Festschrift für Konrad Hoffmann, (Erlangen 1889), pp. 22 ff and 34 ff. of the reprint.
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