Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/54

 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 reishama, that is, "he for whom the samans are composed upon the the rks," or, as we should say, "out of the rks."* It seems likely that the Säma-Veda is built up out of remnants of savage Shamanism--the resemblance between the words Säman and Shamanism, however, is accidental. Shamanism, as is well known, at- tempts 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 concep- tions with a good deal of rough material which they found current among the people. The saman melo- dies, too, betray their popular origin in that they seem to have been sung originally at certain popular festivals, especially the solstitial festivals. The ex- clamations 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 38 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 Sama- Veda, in Vienna Oriental Journal, vol. xvii., p. 156 ff. 2See A. Hillebrandt, Die Sonnenwendfeste in Alt-Indien, Fest- schrift für Konrad Hoffmann, (Erlangen 1889), pp. 22. ff and 34 f. of the reprint.