The Sanskrit drama : $b in its origin, development, theory and practiceKeith, Arthur Berriedale
History
The Sanskrit drama : $b in its origin, development, theory and practice
Keith, Arthur Berriedale
Sanskrit drama -- History and criticism
The logical consequence of this doctrine is seen in Professor von
Schroeder’s elaborate theory [9] that the dialogue hymns, and also
certain monologues, for instance x. 119, in which Indra appears as
glorifying himself in the intoxication of his favourite Soma drink, are
relics of Vedic mysteries, an inheritance in germ from Indo-European
times. Ethnology shows us the close relation of music, dance, and drama
among many peoples, and the curious phenomenon that Vedic religion
knows of gods as dancers cannot be explained satisfactorily save on the
assumption that the priests were used to see performed ritual dances,
in themselves imitations of the cosmic dance in which the world was, on
one view, created. Such dances partake of the nature of sympathetic
magic, and they have an obvious parallel in the great sacrificial
rites, which in the Brāhmaṇa period are undertaken in order to
represent on earth the cosmic creation. It is true that we do not find
in the Ṛgveda the phallic dances which in Greece and Mexico alike are
held to be closely connected with the origin of drama, but that was
because the priests of the Ṛgveda were in many respects austere, and
disapproved of phallic deities of any kind. The dramas of the ritual,
therefore, are in a sense somewhat out of the main line of the
development of the drama; the popular side has survived through the
ages in a rough way in the Yātrās well known in the literature of
Bengal, while the refined and sacerdotalized Vedic drama passed away
without a direct descendant.
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