s time on
thou (man) hast thy home and happiness yonder; may a sure place remain
to him forever. I make firm the earth about thee; may I not be harmed
in laying the clod here; may the fathers hold this pillar for thee,
and Yama make thee a home yonder."

In the Atharva Veda mention is made of a coffin, but none is noticed
here.

Hillebrandt (_loc. cit_. xl. 711) has made it probable that the eighth
verse belongs to a still older ritual, according to which this verse
is one for human sacrifice, which is here ignored, though the text is
kept.[36] 'Just so the later ritual keeps all this text, but twists it
into a crematory rite. For in the later period only young children are
buried. Of burial there was nothing for adults but the collection of
bones and ashes. At this time too the ritual consists of three parts,
cremation, collection of ashes, expiation. How are these to be
reconciled with this hymn? Very simply. The rite is described and
verses from the hymn are injected into it without the slightest
logical connection. That is the essence of all the Brahmanic
ritualism. The later rite is as follows: Three altars are erected,
northwest, southwest, and southeast of a mound of earth. In the fourth
corner is the corpse; at whose feet, the widow. The brother of the
dead man, or an old servant, takes the widow's hand and causes her to
rise while the priest says "Raise thyself, woman, to the world of the
living." Then follows the removal of the bow; or the breaking of it,
in the case of a slave. The body is now burned, while the priest says
"These living ones are separated from the dead"; and the mourners
depart without looking around, and must at once perform their
ablutions of lustration. After a time the collection of bones is made
with the verse "Go thou now to Mother Earth" and "Open, O earth." Dust
is flung on the bones with the words "Roomy and firm be the earth";
and the skull is laid on top with the verse "I make firm the earth
about thee." In other words the original hymn is fitted to the ritual
only by displacement of verses from their proper order and by a forced
application of the words. After all this comes the ceremony of
expiation with the use of the verse "I set up a wall" without
application of any sort. Further ceremonies, with further senseless
use of other verses, follow in course of time. These are all explained
minutely in the essay of Roth, whose clear demonstration of the
modernness of the ritual, a