Falk Harry. Bruderschaft und Würfelspiel: Untersuchungen zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des vedischen Opfers

Freiburg: H. Falk, 1986. — 216 p. — ISBN: 3925270000.Falk has reexamined the whole complex problem of ritual gambling in Vedic religion and has provided impressive and largely satisfying solutions for the whole range of the texts from Rgveda to Grhya- and Srautasutra, including a dreadfully corrupt Vadhulasutra passage on the Rajasuya, hitherto unpublished. Falk distinguishes (1) ritual gambling, associated with the animal sacrifice, involving dicing with large cohorts of vibhldaka fruits (in YV Br., Su., and AV Brahmagavlsukta), (2) profane gaming, uniformly envisaged in RV and AV otherwise, and drawing terminology and allusions from the ritual, and (3) possible stray references to a wholly secular conception of play with a pair of numbered dice, which some would want to associate with Harappan attestation, and which may have influenced the numerology of RV and SV. A long introductory chapter is devoted to the mythology of sodalities, whereby much that would otherwise be sheer conjecture can be confirmed by comparison with other Indo-European cultures: the Vratyas in question are, it seems, the underprivileged (younger sons, impotent sons, and, endearingly enough, unsuccessful poets). According to Falk, their behaviour is modelled on antique notions of land-grabbing and social mobility, just as, according to Heesterman, their Vratyastoma ritual revives obsolete cult practice. practices are somehow being documented here. It is largely explained by Falk's observation that it is all bound up with a form of ritual dicing aimed not at selecting a winner, but at preselecting a loser (viz., the morally endangered butcher of the sacrificial victim). His masterly
exegesis of the texts relating to Agnyadheya and Rajasuya sacrifices show that we are in the realms of panic measures undertaken at the time of winter solstice to ensure the pacification of Rudra and the ascendancy of Indra and the Maruts.