Prose Written to Justify a Rite

The characteristic move of this literature is the identification. A ritual act is performed, and the text states that the act is something else: this brick is the year, this offering is the sacrificer's own self, this number of verses corresponds to that division of the world. The connections are asserted rather than argued, and they are what make the rite effective, because the point of the sacrifice is to operate on the correspondences and not merely to give something to a god.

Alongside the identifications the texts supply etymologies, often playing on sound rather than derivation, and short narratives introduced to explain why a procedure takes the form it does. Those narratives are not told for their own sake and usually stop the moment the ritual point is made. The result is a body of prose that can be hard going and is enormously informative. It records not only what was done at the great sacrifices, in a level of procedural detail the hymn collections never supply, but what the priests performing them understood to be happening while they did it. It is also the earliest sustained prose in any Indian language, so it is a monument of literary history as well as of religion, and the shift from verse to argued prose is itself part of what it documents.