Gavesanam, or on the Track of the Cow and in Search of the Mysterious Word and in Search of the Hidden Light.

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Gavesanam, or on the Track of the Cow and in Search of the Mysterious Word and in Search of the Hidden Light. By SEBASTIAN J. CARRI. Beitrage zur Kenntnis sudasiatischer Sprachen und Literaturen, vol. 6. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ, 2000. Pp. ix + 355. DM 168.

Titles like this make a Vedicist's heart sink. The esoteric nuttiness that inhabits the fringes of our field seems encapsulated therein, and one expects to encounter claims for nuclear power or time travel in Vedic guise. But in this case we should not judge a book by its title: indeed it would be a pity if its title--and the sometimes naive style in which it is written--were to keep potential readers away, for the book presents an original, often exhilarating, and long-sustained journey through numerous apparently unconnected ritual, mythological, and literary facts, in an attempt to discover the conceptual linkage between the well-known power of the word in Vedic and various images of ritual realia. In his introduction the author promises to use the methods of both the jigsaw puzzle and the detective story, the first to reveal associations between disparate data, the second to explain these associations. These models are quite suitable for approaching the deliberate enigmas of Vedic texts, and if not every solution the author proposes is utterly convincing, following "the track of the cow" makes for an interesting trip.

The book begins with a ritual fact and a related mythological fact. The former is the idopahvana or "invocation of Ida," a small episode in the regular sacrifice known as the Darsapurnamasa, the "New and Full Moon Sacrifice." In the idopahvana various fragments of foodstuffs, especially the purodasa or "offering cake," are mixed with melted butter in a vessel, and a priest holding this vessel recites a number of solemn invocations, including one to the female figure Ida. The related mythological fact is derived from the prose explanation of the ritual invocations, found in the Taittiriya Samhita, which is introduced by a brief narration of the creation of a ghee-footed cow (ghrtapadi gauh) by the gods Mitra and Varuna for Manu, the first sacrificer.

In the rest of the book Carri explores each of the elements in this conjunction of ritual and myth: the...