Description: Throughout human history, and across many religious cultures, offerings are made into fire. The essays collected in Homa Variations provide detailed studies of this practice, known in the tantric world as the "homa," from its inception up to the present.
Review Quotes: "Happily, Homa Variations and the Oxford Ritual Studies series as a whole...opens up possibilities for specialists and generalists to ask new kinds of questions about a subject that has been at the center of the study of religion since its beginning." -- Brian Collins, Ohio University, Religious Studies Review
"Some thirty years ago, the publication of the late Frits Staal's Agni: The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar marked a significant milestone in the study of Indian religions and, in the second volume of that monumental work, Staal's collaborators began to explore the diffusion of the fire ritual throughout Asia. With Homa Variations, Professors Payne and Witzel, together with a group of outstanding contributors, extend that project, bringing to bear the resources of the best current field work, textual scholarship and ritual theory on the diversity of the fire ritual in Hindu and Buddhist milieux." --Matthew T. Kapstein, École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris) and The University of Chicago