"I will show a splendid new copy of the 45 min
film called "Altar of Fire" by Harvard film maker Bob Gardner and
myself about the 1975 performance of a Vedic ritual. It is a 16 mm film
which I would introduce in a few words, then play it, then answer
questions as long as the audience wants." (F. S.)
Altar of Fire (1976): A Documentary by Robert
Gardner and J. F. Staal for The Film Study Center at Harvard University
Abstract 1: This film captures what
is, in many ways, the last vestige of an ancient culture. The
Agnicayana, the world's oldest "surviving" ritual and one of the
centerpieces of Vedic religion, is a sacrifice to Agni, god of fire;
Vedic sacrificial rites in India have been replaced by modern Hindu
practice such as puja. The ceremony requires the memorization of
hundreds of lines of text passed down orally through the generations;
it is also exclusively male. The ceremony was performed (or
resurrected, some say) in 1975 at the instigation of an American
scholar and a wealthy American donor; the end result is this
documentary, which briefly explains the origins of the ritual and then
records a group of Nambudiri brahmins enacting their sacrifice for
Robert Gardner's cameras. The circumstances under which the film was
produced raise as many questions as the ritual itself, making it ideal
for scholarly or classroom use. ~ Sarah Welsh, All Movie Guide
Source: http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=217022
Abstract 2: This film records a 12
day ritual performed by Mambudiri Brahmins in Kerala, southwest India,
in April 1975. This event was possibly the last performance of the
Agnicayana, a Vedic ritual of sacrifice dating back 3,000 years and
probably the oldest surviving human ritual. Long considered extinct and
never witnessed by outsiders, the ceremonies require the participation
of seventeen priests, involve libations of Soma juice and oblations of
other substances, all preceded by several months of preparation and
rehearsals. They include the construction, from a thousand bricks, of a
fire altar in the shape of a bird.
Around 1500 B.C., nomads who spoke an Indo-European language entered
India and evolved a complex ritual involving the cults of fire and
Soma, a hallucinogenic plant that grew in the Western Himalayas. Their
Vedic language developed into Sanskrit, the classical language of
Indian civilization. Among the later religions of India, Hinduism
accepted and Buddhism rejected the Vedic culture. But both retained
many of its ritual forms and recitations. Some of these have traveled
all over Asia. Agni, the fire, is still worshipped with the help of
Vedic mantras in Japanese Buddhist temples. In India itself, the
preservation of the Agnicayana, though partly explained by the
extraordinary conservatism of the Vedic Brahmins and their dedication
to the culture of their spiritual ancestors, remains one of the
miracles of history.
Robert Gardner of Harvard University is an ethnographic filmmaker (Dead
Birds and Rivers of Sand) and Frits Staal of the University of
California, Berkeley, is a philosopher and Sanskrit scholar
(ExploringMysticism and Agni, The Vedic Ritual Of The Fire Alter).
Source: http://www.der.org/films/altar-of-fire.html
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