The Big Royal Rites

The Yajur Veda describes three great royal rites in detail. They are the Rajasuya (royal consecration), the Vajapeya (drink of strength), and the Ashvamedha (horse sacrifice). A king performed them to establish, confirm, and extend his sovereignty.

Rajasuya — the royal consecration.

The rite that crowns a king. A long ceremony — months of preparation, days of central performance — in which the king is anointed, given weapons, made to symbolically conquer the four directions, gambled with (yes, ritually), and finally seated on his throne with the assembled priests and chiefs as witnesses.

The famous appearance of the Rajasuya in the Mahabharata — Yudhishthira performs it at Indraprastha, with Krishna installed as the most-honoured guest, which sets up the conflict with Shishupala — is the Yajur Vedic rite at its narrative peak. The full Yajur Veda specification is what the Mahabharata is referring to.

Vajapeya — the drink of strength.

A specialised rite, smaller than the Ashvamedha but very prestigious. Its centerpiece is a chariot race, in which the sponsoring king’s chariot is arranged to win, after which he drinks a special soma preparation and is acclaimed samrat — “paramount lord.” The rite was performed by a king who wanted to claim more than the ordinary status of a raja.

Ashvamedha — the horse sacrifice.

The grandest of the three. A consecrated horse is released to wander for a year, with the king’s army following it. Any kingdom the horse enters must either acknowledge the king or fight the army. After a year the horse returns; a great sacrifice is performed; the king is proclaimed paramount over all the lands the horse traversed.

The Yajur Veda’s instructions for the Ashvamedha are detailed: the choice of horse, the consecration, the year-long protection, the priests’ duties, the final sacrifice. Much of the Mahabharata’s Ashvamedhika Parva (the fourteenth book) is a narrative version of this rite, performed by Yudhishthira after the war.

These three rites are no longer performed in their full traditional form. Two reasons:

• They require a king with real military and political power, which the modern era does not provide.
• They require enormous resources — months of priests, days of soma, many sacrificial animals — that the modern social order does not support.

What survives of them today is symbolic: temple consecrations (kumbhabhishekam), royal-style household rituals at major life events, and the yajamana-driven structure (one host sponsors, several priests perform) that big modern homas still use. The philosophical concept of sovereignty earned by giving — the king becomes king by sponsoring the sacrifice, not by hoarding — is the political lesson the rites carried, and one worth remembering even when the rites themselves are not performed.

Part Two ends here. Part Three turns to the mantras from the Yajur Veda that are still being chanted, every day, in temples and homes.