Old India and the Rigveda.

...which had previously been performed wordlessly or only with short formulas that had not been elevated to a literary existence, were now endowed with songs—fashioned after the style of the old hymns belonging to the Soma sacrifice The Soma ritual was the central, most complex ceremony of the Vedic religion, involving the pressing and offering of a sacred plant juice to the gods.—or with long series of sayings in poetic form. This was the case for weddings and—what is particularly important for our investigations—for burials. Furthermore, it applied to various magical practices: the driving out of demons, the healing of illnesses, charms for married life, and the like. It is not this magic itself, which is ancient in its own right, but rather the literature of the songs or verses belonging to it that finds its beginnings in the latest parts of the Rigveda, only to then continue in rapidly growing volume through the younger Vedic texts.

Indeed, in the Rigvedic examples of this type, we may with great probability see the very first, or at least nearly the first, beginnings of this development. Otherwise, traces of the existence of such a genre of song The author uses the term Liedergattung to describe the distinct literary category of these rhythmic spells. would certainly have been preserved for us in the older layers of Rigvedic poetry as well¹). Presumably, the magical practices of earlier times were content, at least for the most part, with short prosaic incantation formulas. This is understandable enough: for if the use of metrical form Specifically, the use of rhythm and verse as opposed to plain speech. in the sacrificial songs was naturally based on the hope of awakening the god's pleasure through such "ornamentation of speech," why would one use ornamented, pleasure-inducing speech when, for example, addressing a demon to scare them away with threats? The penetration of poetic form into sayings of this kind is clearly a secondary process, stemming from the idea of the...

...the surrounding prose, for which a fixed wording was not prescribed, must be supplemented.

¹) Just as in the older parts of the Rigveda at least some narrative texts are preserved for us, although these also fall outside the sphere of the great sacrifice.