Indo-European Sacred Space: Vedic and Roman Cult.

• Author: Jamison, Stephanie W.

Indo-European Sacred Space: Vedic and Roman Cult. By ROGER D. WOODARD. UrbanA: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS, 2006. Pp. xiv + 296.

The title of this book is best read backwards to get an accurate sense of its focus and contents, for it concerns primarily the structure and details of Roman cult, for which various comparanda are identified in Vedic ritual texts, and the whole set within an Indo-European context from which the materials in the two traditions are presumed by the author to have been inherited. The Roman material sets the agenda and provides the entire framework, even though the title promises a more balanced treatment of the Indic and Italic materials, and the book is therefore less relevant to the readership of this journal than its title suggests. Due to the limitations of my own knowledge and of the subject matter of JAOS, I will confine my comments to the Indic side, though readers should keep in mind that the Roman side is far more substantial.

The other words in the title, "sacred space" and "cult," participate in an intertwined and often ingenious set of arguments, in which the cultic practices of ancient Rome are interpreted as inscribing and defining various sacred spaces, which are then compared with the geography of the Vedic ritual ground and in turn with the cultic practices that take place therein. The most ingenious part of the argument is the equation of the microcosm of Vedic sacred space with what we might call the mesocosm of Roman space, for the author considers all of the city of Rome proper and its environs as sacred geography, with the smaller space of the city corresponding to the smaller devayajana of the simpler srauta rituals, while the area around Rome (especially the Ager Romanus) corresponds to the enlarged ritual ground, the mahavedi, of more elaborate rites. Woodard argues for these correspondences through a consideration both of landmarks and of ritual performances in and movements through both sets of spaces. Clearly this is a bold hypothesis, or set of hypotheses: the difference in scale between the Roman and the Vedic spaces is huge, and this difference in scale magnifies the difficulties of each equation of detail already entailed by the chronological, geographical, and cultural differences between ancient India and ancient Rome.

Such an approach is of course a familiar one in modern Indo-European scholarship, practiced for many decades with great daring and great skill by Georges Dumezil, and...