The Home of the Vedic Sacrifice

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Many writers on Vedic subjects ' have noted the absence in Vedic times of anything that resembles public worship. There is no mention of either minor communal, or national, worship, unless something of the sort be hidden away in the folds of the horse sacrifice. But, according to existing treatment of Rig-Veda matters, worship and sacrifice would seem to have no locus standi at all, to hang in midair, as it were. There are, of course, statements of intimate relations between the gods and the pious. The gods enter the houses of the pious and drink there, but the precise place in whiich they regale themselves is left indeterminate. In my article on the word vid(7tha (JAOS 19. 12 ff.) I showed that this word marks more precisely, and mentions frequently, the place of Vedic worship and sacrifice. It is the patriarchal household,2 usually conceived in the Rig-Veda as the home of pious folk. By the very terms of Vedic life as seen by the Vedic poets the viddtha is, as it were, the church, or, more broadly, the place in which all religious activities, notably the soma sacrifice, take place. The particular spot, or plot, or enclosure within the viditha which is selected for the sacrificial performance is called vrjana. Both words have run an unhappy career. They contribute much to the feeling that Vedic scholars are subject to a distemper which might be called Heterovedicitis, or inability to accept conclusions which are not products of their own minds. How it was possible for Oldenberg and Geldner to write articles on viddtha which ignore She obvious primary meaning of 'household,' their respective treatments of the word differing one from the other wholly in inter-