ABSTRACT
Whatever it is, I published, after Agni, a fair amount of theoretical thinking on Vedic ritual (as well as mantras) in relation to Euro-American theories of ritualor at least the ones I became familiar with (Staal 1984, 1986a, 1988, 1989b). All these theories are semantic because they hold or presuppose that ritual is connected with concepts such as religion, belief, text, myth, or communication. What these categories have in common is meaning. The first three display in addition a monotheist, in particular Protestant, hue. Some of my conclusions were the subjects of discussions (Alper and Padoux in Alper 1988; Grappard et al. 1991; Smith 1991; Staal 1993) or included in handbooks or readers. Some were not entirely new to Indology. The most prominent Sanskrit scholar of the twentieth century, Louis Renou, had written: “Vedic religion is first and foremost a liturgy, and only secondarily a mythological or speculative system; we must therefore investigate it as a liturgy” (1953:29). Equally independent from my writings, though voiced more recently, is the statement by R.N.Dandekar, then the nestor of Indian Vedic scholars: “The Rigvedic mythology can be shown to have hardly any relation to the ‘solemn’ ritual” (1982:77).
