So, what are the Upanishads? Patrick Olivelle, the translator of the book I acquired yesterday, comes up with a useful Introduction.[1] Concluding chapters of the Indian Veda, they document the transition from the archaic ritualism of the most ancient books into new religious ideas and institutions.[2] They come from the Aryans, most likely from ancient Iran, who conquered northern India from the Indus to the Ganges valleys in the second millennium before Christ.[3] The Veda were produced by and largely intended for the Brahmins, the priests, who performed sacrificial rituals.[4] Toward the last centuries of the last millennium before Christ, the rôle of sacrifice within religion preached by the Brahmins started to diminish.[5] The relationship between the priests and the royal classes, the Kshatrias, was largely symbiotic, and the Upanishads show the ascendance of the latter with respect to the former.[6] Vedic rituals persisted, however, and the Kshatrias were the main patrons of the Brahmins.[7] The Vedic cosmology provided for a systematic correspondence between sacrificial animals and the cosmos, as the body parts were connected to cosmic entities, such as the sun, the moon, and the Milky Way.[8] The Upanishads thus provide secret connections, the knowledge of which is guarded by the priests.[9] And so forth. The only thing that Olivelle leaves out is that the archaic ritualism of the Veda is shamanistic in origin. The Upanishads thus ushered a break with shamanism and an introduction to the ideas that lead to Buddhism and Jainism in the middle of the last millennium before Christ. In short, the Upanishads provide a glimpse at shamanism and its rituals in its final days. Even in northern India, the cradle of civilization as we know it, this took place only two and a half millennia ago. That is, only a hundred generations ago.

Footnotes

1. Upanishads, translated by Patrick Olivelle, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. xxiii-lvi.

2. Op. cit., p. xxiii.

3. Op. cit., p. xxv.

4. Op. cit., p. xxx.

5. Op. cit., p. xxxii.

6. Op. cit., p. xxxv.

7. Op. cit., p. xli-xliv.

8. Op. cit., pp. xli-xlix.

9. Op. cit., p. lii.