Page:Atharva-Veda samhita.djvu/87

Rh determined by some most superficial semblance of verbal pertinence in the mantra, when in fact the mantra had no intrinsic and essential pertinence to the practice whatsoever. For example, ÇGS. prescribes the verse ákṣan for use when the bride greases the axle of the wedding-car; here, I think, there can be no doubt that the prescription has been suggested by the surface resemblance of ákṣan 'they have eaten' to ákṣam 'axle.' Or, again, to take an example which has been interestingly treated by Bloomfield, the verses xiv. 2. 59-62 doubtless referred originally to the mourning women, who, with dishevelled hair, wailed and danced at a funeral; and they were presumably used originally as an expiation for such noisy proceedings. Secondarily, they have been adapted for use in connection with the wedding ceremonies, "in case a wailing arises," and doubtless for no better reason than that they contained the word for "wailing"; and they have accordingly been placed by the diaskeuasts among the wedding verses, where we now find them. See Bloomfield, AJP. xi. 341, 338: and cf. vii. 466.

General relations of this recension to the Vulgate or Çāunakan recension. —Just as, on the one hand, the minute differences between two closely related manuscripts of the same recension (for example, between Whitney's P. and M.) represent upon a very small scale the results of human fallibility, so, upon the other hand, do the multitudinous and pervading differences between the general readings of the manuscripts of the Vulgate and those of the birch-bark manuscript of the Kashmirian recension truly represent in like manner the fallibility of human tradition, but on a very large scale. The Çāunakan or Vulgate recension represents one result of the selective process by which the Indian diaskeuasts took from the great mass of mantra-material belonging to the oral tradition of their school a certain amount, arranging it in a certain order; the Kashmirian recension represents another and very different result of a similar process.

Since the birch-bark manuscript has thus far maintained its character as a unique, we shall perhaps never know how truly it represents the best Kashmirian tradition of this Veda; it is quite possible that that tradition was vastly superior to the written reflex thereof which we possess in the