ry
preliminary to every Soma-sacrifice is the construction, in five layers,
of a special fire-altar of large dimensions, consisting of thousands of
bricks, formed and baked on the spot, to each, or each group, of which a
special symbolic meaning is attached. The building of this altar is
spread over a whole year, during which period the sacrificer has to
carry about the sacrificial fire in an earthen pan for at least some
time each day, until it is finally deposited on the completed altar to
serve as the offering-fire for the Soma oblations. The altar itself is
constructed in the form of a bird, because Soma was supposed to have
been brought down from heaven by the metre Gayatri which had assumed the
form of an eagle. Whilst the Soma-sacrifice has been thus developed by
the Brahmanas in an extraordinary degree, its essential identity with
the Avestan Haoma-cult shows that its origin goes back at all events to
the Indo-Iranian period.

Among the symbolic conceits in which the authors of the Brahmanas so
freely indulge, there is one overshadowing all others--if indeed they do
not all more or less enter into it--which may be considered as the sum
and substance of these speculations, and the esoteric doctrine of the
sacrifice, involved by the Brahmanical ritualists. This is what may
conveniently be called the Prajapati theory, by which the "Lord of
Creatures," the efficient cause of the universe, is identified with both
the sacrifice (_yajna_) and the sacrificer (_yajamana_). The origin of
this theory goes back to the later Vedic hymns. In the so-called
Purusha-sukta (_Rigv._ x. 90) in which the supreme spirit is conceived
of as _the_ person or man (_purusha_), born in the beginning, and
consisting of "whatever hath been and whatever shall be," the creation
of the visible and invisible universe is represented as originating from
an "all-offered" (holocaust) sacrifice in which the Purusha himself
forms the offering-material (_havis_), or, as we might say, the victim.
In this primeval, or rather timeless because ever-proceeding, sacrifice,
time itself, in the shape of its unit the year, is made to take its
part, inasmuch as the three seasons--spring, summer and autumn--of which
it consists, constitute the ghee (clarified butter), the offering-fuel
and the oblation respectively. These speculations may be said to have
formed the foundation on which the theory of the sacrifice, as
propounded in the Brahmanas, has been reared. Pr