I gather from Eliade’s warnings that the Rig Veda provides a glimpse of only that portion of Vedic religion important to the educated elite. However, it seems like what it conveys is built entirely around various forms of sacrifice. I guess what we know about this religious tradition is deduced entirely from the sacrifices that they employed (observed?) and the apparent meanings that they attached to those sacrifices. I guess this also means that the educated elite who produced and read the passages of the Rig Veda likewise saw their religion primarily through the lens of sacrifices, what they entailed and what they meant.
The oddity being that humans created these sacrificial rituals which are then passed down to other humans, presumably with things being occasionally added or omitted. There was some set of beliefs about the gods, whether explicitly stated or implicitly presumed, that presumably shaped those rituals, and other similar beliefs that shaped subsequent amendments. Eventually one set of recipients, I guess no longer privy to those original premises, use those same rituals to deduce the nature of the rituals’ divinity. One cannot know whether the conclusions they reached were the same ones that led their ancestors to design the rituals in the first place. Given that those conclusions tended towards a kind of quasi-monotheistic construct in which this multiplicity of gods represent a single divine principal it would seem that they came to some very different beliefs than those which inspired their ancestors to create rituals so specifically dedicated to different and unique divine entities.
