Elaborate Offerings
April 14, 2007
During the March yagya series, our priests performed a yagya called Chandi Havan. This yagya is based on the use of Chandi Path as the source material for the mantras. Chandi Path is 700 verses long and tells the story of the Divine Mother in the form of Durga.
This yagya is much more elaborate than most and requires special training on the part of the priests. At the end of each verse, the priests offer a sweet rice mixture called sacra pongal into the yagya fire as seen here.
At the end of each section of verses, a special offering is made into the fire of cloth and very specific kinds of herbs, bark, roots, wood, leaves, spices, nuts, etc. The following photo will give you an idea of how extensive the list of ingredients are:
All these are used to create a series of offerings, the completed version is seen below. The main collection of offerings are placed on the different colored cloth and are all the same. But the the baskets arranged along the wall are all different and are offered in a specific order.
Here you see one of the offering cloths having been placed in the yagya fire. Because of all the sweet rice and cloth being offered into the fire, the areas gets very smokey and the yagya is a real challenge to sit through. I really don’t know how the priest manage to do it, particularly because it takes about four hours to complete!
