Indo-European Poetry and Myth

8

Hymns and Spells

INVOCATORY HYMNS

Something was said in the first chapter about the invocatory hymn as one of
the genres in which the Indo-European poet was called upon to exercise his
skills. The occasion for its performance was a public ceremony, in most cases
no doubt involving a sacrifice or other offering. The poet was not conducting
a private devotional colloquy with the deity but engaging his or her attention
on behalf of the king or patron and his family and retainers, or a wider
community, and petitioning for blessings for them.
The textual evidence from which we must work is rather unbalanced in its
distribution. We are fortunate in having a large corpus of early hymns in the
Rigveda. It is easy to distinguish what is typical and formulaic in them from
what is not. Hittite hymns are not nearly so abundant, and they seem to owe
more to Mesopotamian than to Indo-European traditions, but they provide
some useful points of comparison all the same.
The Avesta shows a fascinating interplay of old Iranian religious tradition
and Zoroastrian renovation. The Ga ̄tha ̄s, Zarathushtra’s own compositions,
are not hymns in the Vedic mould but songs or poems that he sang or recited
at gatherings of his family and/or his followers, and in which he voiced his
devotional and other aspirations. They contain nevertheless some typical
hymnic elements. The Younger Avesta, less firmly imprinted with the master’s
personality, is also less purified of older residues.
In pre-Hellenistic Greek we have a range of material, from the Homeric
Hymns, which rhapsodes used as prefaces to epic recitations and which have
little religious content, to society poetry in hymn form by the elegiac and lyric
poets, hymns put in the mouths of dramatic choruses, and hymns composed
for local religious events and recorded in inscriptions. Later poets and prose
writers had a sure ear for the old formal features of hymns and prayers and
continued to echo them in appropriate contexts. Such features often appear
in Latin too, clearly not as independent inheritance but taken over from