A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries

by Mircea Eliade

Light brings life; or maybe light creates life.

The plant, the drink made from the plant, and the ritual of consuming the drink all have the same name.

I had no idea that this simile dated so far back as Vedic Religion. I wonder at the Bronze Age poet who thought up a phrase that is still used 3,400 years later.

It grows so high because it originated in the heavens.

Only something mystical in nature can serve as a metaphor for all these processes of life and the cosmos.

Purchase?

I think Hydromel is a type of mead. How do we know that Soma was not made from a plant that grows on both the Iranian Plateau and the Indian Sub-Continent, there must be a number of such edible plants; or from a plant that was native to Iran (or elsewhere in Western Asia), but was brought with migrants to and grown in India?

It’s a good refrain.

It it inherent in Yogic & Tantric practices? Are those influences unique to Indian religions or, if not unique, more prevalent than in other religions?

Interesting

The three strides traverse the space from one realm to another.

To assimilate multiple gods into a monotheistic framework of some type.

It seems odd that all of the original descriptions were of a kind of anti-god, a being that was the opposite of what a god is supposed to be, but that all of his epithets sound like honorifics.

Never heard of them.

Siva, whose name enters religious language as a title of Rudra, will become the main figure in Hinduism?

So weddings were included in the festivals performed by the head of the family, rather than an officiant or priest. Strike that, I think that by “private” Eliade means rituals performed by a priest or official outside of public view, maybe. It could be explained better.

And some modern ones.

It makes sense. It commemorates a kind of new creation of the person. Birth seems like a good analogy.

Again with the rebirth.

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.

Wait, there are supposed to have been 400 men on duty at all times watching one horse? In one of a series of small pastoral kingdoms? I feel like this ritual instruction is more aspirational than descriptive. This seems true of some of the more baroque descriptions of sacrifices in the previous section as well. Eliade fairly casually tossed out the idea of a ritual where 1,000 cattle were sacrificed. I don’t think he stopped to consider the wealth that such a thing would require, or even the logistics of carrying it out. I have had some long days, but I have never been asked to kill 1,000 large mammals with only hand-held man-powered tools. Where would you even put the carcasses?

Again with 400, which seems either like a number of ritual importance or a stand in for “a lot.” I cannot see where all these attendants are coming from in early Iron Age India.

What does he mean by “received?” If he means what is implied, surely he cannot think that these descriptions are literal. There were some four-hundred ladies in waiting. I don’t know who these priests were, but god bless their resilience and persistence.

One of the groups of people commonly referred to under the umbrella term “Scythian.”

In a sense the king is sacrificing himself, or a surrogate that represents him.

The ancient Aryans practiced human sacrifice?

Which, honestly, seems much more in spirit of the symbolic nature of these gestures. Or, at least, more like how I want them to look. I guess human sacrifice had been an extant practice within India-European speaking cultures as well as people from different linguistic and cultural traditions.

Is this a continuation of some ancient Indo-European tradition or is it borrowed from Christianity. Hell, it could be totally unrelated to either.

A metaphysics of salvation

A non symbolic immolation can be rough for the initiate. A non symbolic regressus ab uterum is presumably exceptionally unpleasant for all involved.

I guess it is odd that the idea of death and of birth are so tightly intertwined. Is this a natural conclusion given their positions at opposite ends of an observable cycle? Is it obvious only to an agricultural society which uses the seeds harvested at the death of one crop in the fall to seed the birth of the next in the spring? Do we imply it from the nature of eating and life, where plants and animals die so as we may live?

Obviously the citation demonstrates that this was accepted as fact by the Aryan priests who practiced these rituals. We’re they right? Do embryos keep their fists clenched the entire time they are in the womb? Why?

A synonym for aminos, the outermost membrane enclosing the embryo. Presumably derived from a root in a different language.

It seems like the king often fills a role of the representative of the people before their gods.

Is the idea that there was an original cosmology reflected in an original religion documented in the surprisingly similar cave sanctuaries found around the world?

Fire born out of water, the idea discussed earlier of all things containing their own negation.

Not inconsistent with totality, he encompasses both genders, though he is also still male.

I like the link of moon and consciousness. I don’t know exactly what it means, but I do dig it.

Like Odin, he sacrifices himself to himself.

Tiamat was not a sacrifice in the typical manner, as she was slain in combat. I guess that the distinction is not super important, though there is an absolutely tangible distinction between a god slain by a foe and one which chooses itself as a sacrifice, and something wonderfully devious about not only sacrificing yourself, but sacrificing yourself to yourself.

This sacrifice provides the raw physical material used for creation.

Wouldn’t the lack of being be non-being by default. I don’t think that non-being need, or even may, exist.

It’s also a very logical deduction. My first thought was that it mirrored modern cosmology a little, but it occurred to me that what the two shared in common were the logically required premises. First that the lack of existence could only be defined as a state of undifferentiated potential; and second that the beginning of creation required a massive expansion outwards from that undifferentiated mass.

A number of the cosmologies we have encountered, or at least those from Hatti and Mycenaean, featured a world that seemed to predate the gods who become its rulers. Those, however, did not seem as interested as Vedic religion in plumbing the origins of that world.

Why is the premise of a single god the “highest” point of achievement for Vedic religion?

So, Prajapatti was the entity that preceded creation?

Prajapatti is the egg/the earth? Also, the whole earth is an unhatched egg?

Which seems intuitive. I am not certain that it’s un-true.

The altar is a year, made of 360 bricks representing each day and 360 bricks representing each night.

So, the ritual itself, rather than the gods which it honors is the heart of the religion. There is a thread of sense running through. The world predates the gods, demonstrating some force greater than the divinities. The explanation for that world’s existence must involve some unitary entity giving up a portion of its own totality to make the world. This voluntary diminution is sacrifice. This rite, which created the very universe, is the key to all things creative and restorative. This rite, therefor, is the most central aspect in their view of the universe.