The Domestic Fire Offering

Homa, also called havan, is the fire offering in its ordinary and portable form: a fire kindled in a small square altar, into which clarified butter, grains and other offerings are poured while Vedic or other sacred verses are recited. It is the household descendant of the great public fire sacrifice (yajna) of the Vedas, reduced to a scale that a family and a single priest can perform, and it is carried out at the thresholds of life and at auspicious undertakings, weddings, house-blessings, the start of ventures, and many of the life-cycle rites, several of which include a fire offering at their heart.

The logic is the ancient one of the Vedic sacrifice, the consecrated fire serving as the mouth that conveys the offering to the gods, but domesticated into a rite of blessing and sanctification for ordinary occasions. Its persistence keeps the Vedic fire alight within a Hinduism otherwise long centred on image worship, and it remains among the most commonly performed of Hindu rituals.