Page:The Sanskrit Drama.djvu/21

16 how men dance and sing to music. There is, therefore, a priori no fatal objection to assuming that the period of the Ṛgveda knew dramatic spectacles, religious in character, in which the priests assumed the rôles of gods and sages in order to imitate on earth the events of the heavens.

The logical consequence of this doctrine is seen in Professor von Schroeder's elaborate theory that the dialogue hymns, and also certain monologues, for instance x. 119, in which Indra appears as glorifying himself in the intoxication of his favourite Soma drink, are relics of Vedic mysteries, an inheritance in germ from Indo-European times. Ethnology shows us the close relation of music, dance, and drama among many peoples, and the curious phenomenon that Vedic religion knows of gods as dancers cannot be explained satisfactorily save on the assumption that the priests were used to see performed ritual dances, in themselves imitations of the cosmic dance in which the world was, on one view, created. Such dances partake of the nature of sympathetic magic, and they have an obvious parallel in the great sacrificial rites, which in the Brāhmaṇa period are undertaken in order to represent on earth the cosmic creation. It is true that we do not find in the Ṛgveda the phallic dances which in Greece and Mexico alike are held to be closely connected with the origin of drama, but that was because the priests of the Ṛgveda were in many respects austere, and disapproved of phallic deities of any kind. The dramas of the ritual, therefore, are in a sense somewhat out of the main line of the development of the drama; the popular side has survived through the ages in a rough way in the Yātrās well known in the literature of Bengal, while the refined and sacerdotalized Vedic drama passed away without a direct descendant.

Independent support for the view of the dialogues as mystery plays in nuce is given by Dr. Hertel, whose argument is largely based on the doctrine that the Vedic hymns were always sung, and that in singing it would have been impossible for a single singer to make the necessary distinction between the different speakers, which would have been possible if the hymns had not