Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/96

 The Religion of the Veda hymns, somewhat in the manner of the later Ve- dic schools or branches (çakha) of one and the same Veda. 80 Large numbers of technical, ritualistic words and expressions crowd the pages of the Rig-Veda. Its metres are finished and conventional to a very high degree; they are also, to some extent, distributed among the gods, so that a given metre is associated especially with a certain god. For instance, the gayatri is the metre of the god Agni; the trishtubh the metre of the god Indra. They are also distributed to some extent according to the time of the day: the gayatri in the morning, the trishtubh at noon, the jagati at evening. Above all, the advanced character of the Rig-Veda's ritual manifests itself in the large number of different designations for priests. These occur not only singly, but in series: the names of these priests are largely, though not entirely, the names of the priests of the later ceremonial.¹ And yet the poetry of the Rig-Veda is, in a deeper sense, original. It is primitive religious poctry, if by primitive we mean uninterrupted contact with the last source of its inspiration. The final judg- ment of its character, after all, depends not so much ¹ See Hillebrandt, Rituallitteratur, p. 11 f, and the literature cited on p. 17 of the same work.