The Uttarārcika · Chapter Overview
From The Sāmaveda — The Veda That Is Sung, taught by Acharya T Krishnatrey. This lesson is free to read.
<pre data-block="statement"> Everything so far has been the index. This is the liturgy. The Uttarārcika is the Sāmaveda's performance text — verses 651 to 1875, some 1225 mantras, nearly twice the size of the Pūrvārcika. Where the Pūrvārcika gives isolated seed-verses, one per melody, the Uttarārcika gives the mantras in the sequences actually sung at the soma sacrifice, grouped as they occur in the stotras. The two halves are not duplicates. They are complements. The Pūrvārcika teaches you the tune; the Uttarārcika tells you what to sing, in what order, on the day. Its basic unit is the tṛca, a group of three verses chanted as one stotra-unit — and about seventy per cent of its sections are exactly three verses long. It runs in nine prapāṭhakas, each of two or three ardhas. Fourteen of its mantras follow. Among them are the Rathantara and Vāmadevya sāmans, the Gāyatrī with its own melody, and the two verses on which the entire Veda closes. </pre>