The Ravenous Hyenas and the Wounded Sun: Myth and Ritual in Ancient India.

• Author: Brereton, Joel P.

This crucial work significantly advances our understanding not only of what Vedic myths mean but also of how they mean. Two myths, or rather two complexes of stories and related rituals, provide the case studies that Jamison uses to open up the world of Vedic myth. Through them, she illustrates ways of discovering meaning in narratives, even when their sources provide only fragmented retellings and their cultural context is obscure.

I hesitate to describe too completely Jamison's reconstructions and interpretations of these two myths. Her argument is built as the logical unraveling of a mystery, and therefore it seems almost as wrong to reveal its conclusions as it would be to give away the ending of detective story. She presents the evidence and deduces her way to conclusions that are almost inescapable, and even elementary, if, of course, one possesses Jamison's sharpness of perception and mastery over the evidence. A great deal of the pleasure this book offers its reader, and must have given its author, derives from the meticulous arrangement of pieces that leads to the final exposure of meaning.

Following Jamison's reconstructions, the elements of the myths are these: in the first, Indra, in the form of a female hyena, hands over a group of priests called Yatis to her/his cubs to eat. In some versions, several Yatis survive; in others, there is no mention of survivors. In either case, the irony is that the destruction of the Yatis brings about the fulfillment of their ritual purposes. In the second myth, Agni (Fire) pierces or darkens the Sun as a punishment for committing incest with the Sun's daughter, Dawn. Since the Sun's light is necessary, however, the gods enlist the seer Atri to heal it, a process equivalent to the Sun's second birth.

They are both strange tales, and one compelling aspect of Jamison's analysis is her ability to show that beneath their odd appearance, they address fundamental religious and human concerns. They explain the form and meaning of various Vedic rites, and they explore the realities of wrong-doing and punishment, of birth and miscarriage, of disease and healing, and of sexual development. Her analysis thus moves Vedic study further away from views of myth as poetic representation of natural processes or as concealed history and toward one that...