The Dawns That Make Us Old: How the Rig Veda Talks About Aging

A Wife Counts the Dawns

Somewhere in the first book of the Rig Veda a woman is speaking to her husband, and she is tired. Not of him, exactly; of the schedule. She has been working at the same thing for a very long time, and she says so in the first line of the hymn:

pūrvīr ahaṃ śaradaḥ śaśramāṇā doṣā vastor uṣaso jarayantīḥ | mināti śriyaṃ jarimā tanūnām apy ū nu patnīr vṛṣaṇo jagamyuḥ

“For many autumns I have toiled, evening and morning, through dawns that bring on old age. Aging diminishes the splendor of bodies. Surely the bulls should now go to their wives.”

Rigveda RV 1.179.1, my translation; the speaker is Lopāmudrā, the wife of the sage Agastya. [1][2]

Two things are unusual here before the grammar even starts. The first is the speaker: this is a woman’s complaint about marriage and the body, delivered in the earliest Sanskrit we have, and the tradition preserved it as a hymn. The second is the culprit. She does not blame time in the abstract, or fate, or her husband’s austerities (the hymn’s later verses suggest he had been busy with something of the kind). She blames the dawns. They are the ones doing the aging. Each morning is a small installment on a debt.

That placement of blame turns out to be a pattern, not a flourish. The Rig Veda contains no treatise on old age, no hymn to it and no god of it, which is why it rarely appears in surveys. But the vocabulary of aging is scattered across the collection with a telling consistency, and when you gather it the picture is odd and rather moving. Dawn is the thing that wears people down. Old age is something to be reached, with prayers asking for it. And the very word for aging, jarā, has a double in the language that means “to call out in praise,” the verb the poets used to name themselves.

This article follows that thread: what the poets say when they talk about growing old, which gods they ask for help, what they refuse to say, and why a text so occupied with fresh fires and new songs keeps coming back to the slow loss of splendor in a body.

Methods note. The counts above come from regular-expression searches of a romanised Saṃhitā text, followed by a hand check of the aging verses. The Rig Veda’s word boundaries are fused by sandhi, and the text I searched has its own transcription quirks, so these are floors, not census figures. For anything citable, use Grassmann’s dictionary or Lubotsky’s concordance, which list every occurrence. [3][4]

Two Words That Sound Alike

Before looking at what the poets say about aging, it helps to pin down what they call it. Three families of words matter.

Table 1. The vocabulary of aging. Not exhaustive; Sanskrit has other words for “old” (sthavira, vṛddha) that mark seniority rather than decay.

Now the complication. The same sequence of sounds, jar-, also begins a quite separate verb meaning “to call out, to address, to sing.” From it comes jaritṛ, “the one who calls out”, which the poets use for themselves roughly a hundred and fourteen times. It also gives the noun jarā used in the sense “invocation, praise.” You can see it at RV 1.38.13, where the poet says to address Brahmaṇaspati “for the invocation” (jarāyai), and at RV 1.27.10, where Agni is jarābodha, usually understood as “one who is awake to praise.” [3][5]

The glosses in the lexica keep the “age” verb and the “call” verb apart, as two different roots that happen to coincide in form (the etymological argument is in Mayrhofer). I am not claiming the poets confused them; most verses make clear which one is meant. But the density of the second family is striking when set beside the first. The Rig Veda names its own makers, over a hundred times, with a word that sounds exactly like “the aging one,” and it mentions aging itself nine times in the same sound.

graph TD
    A["Sound: jar-"] --> B["Root 1: wear out"]
    A --> C["Root 2: call out, praise"]
    B --> D["jarimā, jaras: aging"]
    B --> E["ajara: ageless"]
    B --> F["jaradaṣṭi: full span"]
    C --> G["jaritṛ: the singer"]
    C --> H["jarābodha: awake to praise"]
    D --> I["Dawn wears lives down"]
    G --> J["Dawn is what poets wake for"]

Figure 1. Two roots, one sound. The branches meet in Dawn, who is both the clock that ages people and the occasion the singers rise to greet.

Notice that last link. The poets are jaritāraḥ, “callers”, and what they call to, very often at the opening of the day, is Dawn, the same figure who is blamed for the aging of Lopāmudrā’s body. The singers rise before her and sing; the song and the loss arrive at the same hour. Whether any poet heard the echo is unknowable. That the language set them side by side is a fact.

Dawn, the Ager

The best-known goddess of the Rig Veda is also, if you read her verses with this theme in mind, the most unsettling. Dawn is beautiful and she is relentless. The relevant passage is RV 1.92.10, in a hymn that is otherwise nothing but admiration:

punaḥ-punar jāyamānā purāṇī samānaṃ varṇam abhi śumbhamānā | śvaghnīva kṛtnur vija āminānā martasya devī jarayanty āyuḥ

“Born again and again, ancient, adorning herself in the same color, like a gamester gathering in the stakes and diminishing them, the goddess wears out the lifespan of the mortal.”

Rigveda RV 1.92.10, my translation. The gambling simile is hard and renderings vary; compare the Jamison and Brereton translation. [2]

Everything in this verse is double. Dawn is purāṇī, ancient, and punaḥ-punar jāyamānā, born again and again. She keeps the same color; the mortal does not. And she does it like a gambler, which links her to a hymn we have read elsewhere: the same dice that ruin the gambler at RV 10.34 here collect the days of a human life, one at a time. (For that hymn, see The Gambler’s Hymn.)

The next verse names her action precisely:

praminatī manuṣyā yugāni yoṣā jārasya cakṣasā vi bhāti

“Diminishing the human ages, the young woman shines out with the eye of her lover.”

Rigveda RV 1.92.11, my translation.

The verb is mināti, “diminish, cut short,” here with the preverb pra-. It is the same verb as in Lopāmudrā’s line (mināti śriyam, “diminishes the splendor”), and the same one at RV 1.71.10, where aging “diminishes the form” (nabho na rūpaṃ jarimā mināti; the simile nabho na, “like a cloud” or “like the sky”, is obscure). It is also the verb at RV 1.124.2, in which Dawn is described with a pair that is worth pausing over: aminatī daivyāni vratāni, praminatī manuṣyā yugāni, “not diminishing the divine ordinances, diminishing the human ages.” [2][6]

This is where the passage stops being a lament and becomes an argument.

The verb for breaking a law

Mi is not only the verb for diminishing. It is also the verb for infringing a vow. The first hymn to Varuna in the Rig Veda has the poets confess, “Whatever we infringe (minīmasi) of your ordinance, god Varuna, day after day” (RV 1.25.1). The same verb in the negative, a-minat, is used of a power that does not infringe the order. [7]

Table 2. One verb across the cosmic and the bodily. Dawn never infringes the divine rule; the price of her punctuality is paid by people.

Put the table into a sentence and you get a startling reading. Dawn’s regularity is the cosmic order working. Her failure to break the rule is exactly what wears human beings out. In this Rig Vedic way of seeing, aging is not a malfunction in the universe; it is a side-effect of the universe being reliably right. The sun that returns on schedule is the same sun that uses up your autumns. The order that keeps the sky from falling (the subject of The Sky Does Not Fall) is the order that makes Lopāmudrā’s days add up.

Aside. I am drawing out an implication here, not summarizing a doctrine. No Rig Vedic poet states “aging is the price of ṛta.” What the text gives us is the shared verb and the contrasting pair of negations at 1.124.2. The inference is mine, and a skeptical reader can fairly say the poets chose mi because it was the nearest word for “reduce,” with no deeper design. I think the pairing at 1.124.2, with its two negative and positive forms side by side, is too precise to be accidental, but I would not build a theology on it.

The goddess who is not Tithonus

Anyone who knows Greek myth will hear an echo. Dawn in Greek is Eos, a cognate of the Vedic name by regular sound correspondence, and her best-known story is the story of a lover who aged. Eos asked Zeus to make Tithonus immortal and forgot to ask for youth; the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (lines 218 to 238) tells how he shriveled until his voice alone was left, flowing on without strength. [8][9]

The temptation is to call this an inherited motif, and to find a Vedic Tithonus. I do not think the text supports that. There is no mortal lover who ages while Dawn stays young in the Rig Veda, no petition for immortality that goes sour. What the Vedic poets have instead is the general pairing: the goddess of the morning is ancient and unchanging in color, and the humans watching her are not. The Greek tale makes the contrast personal and tragic. The Rig Vedic hymns keep it structural. The shared Indo-European inheritance, if there is one, is the pairing of the dawn goddess with time’s attrition, and no more. [9]

The Generations Who Watched

If Dawn is the one who ages us, she is also the one who measures how many of us there have been. There is a passage in the great dawn hymn RV 1.113 that I think is among the most affecting in the whole collection, and it is about generations of watchers.

īyuṣ ṭe ye pūrvatarām apaśyan vyuchantīm uṣasaṃ martyāsaḥ | asmābhir ū nu praticakṣyābhūd o te yanti ye aparīṣu paśyān

“Gone are those mortals who saw the earlier Dawn shining. By us she has now been seen. And they are coming who will see her in the later ones.”

Rigveda RV 1.113.11, my translation.

Three tenses in two lines: those who saw her are gone, we see her now, others are coming. The verse is a small census of the human race, using a single goddess as the standing fixed point. And two verses later the poet gives her an adjective that makes the contrast complete:

…ajarāmṛtā carati svadhābhiḥ

“…ageless and undying she moves by her own powers.”

Rigveda RV 1.113.13, my translation of the closing words of the line.

Ajarā, “not aging”, beside amṛtā, “not dying.” The poet is not claiming Dawn is eternal in some philosophical sense; the word is ajara, a plain descriptive negation, the sort used of a fire that keeps burning. It identifies her as the thing in the picture that does not wear.

Who else gets the epithet? A rough survey of the roughly thirty-three verses using ajara shows how selective it is.

Table 3. What does not age. A sample, not a full inventory; many occurrences are in Agni hymns.

Almost everything on this list is something that recurs: flames re-lit, dawns returning, stones used again and again, and gods who are, as their traditional epithet says, always young. In the Vedic mind, as the lists show, the opposite of aging is not some stasis. It is return. A thing is ageless when it can be born again and again, as Dawn is in 1.92.10 (punaḥ-punar jāyamānā), while a person, who cannot be re-lit, wears down.

Praying to Get There

You might expect a text this alert to aging to be full of prayers against it. It is not. The most common request in the Rig Veda that touches on old age is a request to arrive. Look at the phrasing across the main verses.

Table 4. Prayers that mention old age. In every case old age is the destination, not the threat.

The first of these is the best. The poet appeals to the gods:

śatam in nu śarado anti devā yatrā naś cakrā jarasaṃ tanūnām | putrāso yatra pitaro bhavanti mā no madhyā rīriṣatāyur gantoḥ

“A hundred autumns lie ahead of us, gods, in which you have set the old age of our bodies; where sons become fathers. Do not harm our lifespan in the middle of its going.”

Rigveda RV 1.89.9, my translation. The verse closes the hymn that opens bhadraṃ karṇebhiḥ śṛṇuyāma, “may we hear what is auspicious with our ears.” For its framing as a “hundred autumns” prayer see Hundred Autumns. [2]

Two things distinguish this from a wish for longevity. First, old age is called the thing you have placed in our bodies (cakrā jarasaṃ tanūnām), as if it were a feature of the design, which in the poet’s view it is. Second, the definition is relational: old age is where sons become fathers. There is no abstract number of years in the sentence beyond the “hundred,” only a position in the sequence of generations. The danger the poet fears is not growing old; it is being cut off in the middle (madhyā).

This explains an otherwise puzzling phrase at RV 8.67.20: the Ādityas are asked that no weapon strike “before old age.” The prayer assumes that a death by old age is what the gods owe. It also explains a remark in the Vṛṣākapi hymn at RV 10.86.11, where Indrāṇī is called the luckiest of women because nahy asyā aparaṃ cana jarasā marate patiḥ, “her husband will never die of old age.” Read it carefully: dying of old age is being offered as the best fortune a wife can have. [2]

The funeral verse that chooses age

The most striking entry in the table is the funeral hymn. RV 10.18 is the one in which the living and the dead are separated by a boundary set between them and a prayer that the living not follow the dead too soon (10.18.4: “may they live a hundred autumns”). The line I want is verse 6:

ā rohatāyur jarasaṃ vṛṇānā anupūrvaṃ yatamānā yatiṣṭha | iha tvaṣṭā sujanimā sajoṣā dīrgham āyuḥ karati jīvase vaḥ

“Climb up to lifespan, choosing old age, striving each in order as you go. Here may Tvaṣṭar, well-born, in accord, make long life for you to live.”

Rigveda RV 10.18.6, my translation. See also Funeral Hymns. [2]

The verb vṛ, “to choose,” has jarasam as its object. The mourners are told to choose old age, to climb up to it, and to proceed anupūrvam, in order, one after another, which is the opposite of what has just happened to the person on the pyre. Old age is framed as an achievement of orderly progress. The funeral is the exception that proves the sequence.

Notice that the poets do not ask to stay young. The wish for rejuvenation exists in the Rig Veda, but it is reserved for a single, special figure.

The One Who Was Made Young

That figure is Cyavana. The Aśvins, the divine physicians, are credited with reversing old age in him, and the phrasing is worth looking at because it shows how the poets imagined the thing they were reversing.

At RV 1.116.10, they “stripped the covering (vavri) like a cloak (drāpi) from Cyavana” who had become worn. At RV 7.71.5 they “released Cyavana from old age” (jarasaḥ amumuktam). And at RV 10.39.4 comes the most memorable image: yuvaṃ cyavānaṃ sanayaṃ yathā rathaṃ punar yuvānaṃ carathāya takṣathuḥ, “you fashioned Cyavana, grown old, again young for roaming, as one fashions a chariot.” [2]

Old age here is a garment you can take off and a wooden object you can rebuild. The carpenter’s verb takṣ, the same one poets use for composing hymns (see Fashioned Like a Chariot), is used on a human body. Which is to say, in one sense the Aśvins are poets of the body, remaking a worn form into a new one. For their wider repertoire of cures, including the metal leg, see Broken Bodies.

But the point I want to stress is the scarcity. The Cyavana verses are a handful, they concern one person, and they are told with the sense of a marvel. The Rig Veda does not suggest this is available to everyone. Later literature fills in the story with Cyavana’s wife and a full episode, as in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, but that is later elaboration on a few Rig Vedic hints. [10]

What the Poet Admits

There is one more voice worth listening to: the poet who does not pray, who does not ask for anything, who simply notes what is happening to him.

At RV 5.41.15 a poet of the Ātreya family (attributions are an old habit and not always reliable; see Impossible Authors) says in the middle of a request to the Maruts:

pade-pade me jarimā ni dhāyi

“At every step, aging has been laid upon me.”

Rigveda RV 5.41.15, my translation of the first pāda. [2]

It is an almost casual line, delivered in passing, in a hymn that is mostly a petition for aid. A few verses later, at 5.41.17, comes a stranger sentence, in which the poet asks that Nirṛti (Dissolution, the goddess of decay and destruction) “swallow my old age” (jarāṃ cin me nirṛtir jaghrasīta). The line is obscure. It may mean “let Dissolution consume only my old age and nothing of me before then,” or it may be a cry that she take the old age away. Translators differ. What is clear is that the poet places jarā in the keeping of Nirṛti, the figure the Rig Veda otherwise associates with dissolution and loss. [2]

Both of these are the poet telling us how it feels, rather than what the gods should do about it. And the fourth passage of this kind is the one we began with: Lopāmudrā at 1.179.1, who not only counts her years but draws the conclusion. If aging diminishes the splendor of bodies, then the delay should end. Her husband’s reply, in the hymn’s later verses, is the other half of the dialogue; scholars assign the verses between them in various ways, and the hymn is one of the Rig Veda’s saṃvāda or dialogue pieces (see Dialogue Hymns). I won’t try to adjudicate the speaker boundaries here; the Anukramaṇī assigns some verses to Lopāmudrā and some to Agastya, and modern translators sometimes disagree about the later ones. [2][11]

Aside. A fair caution. Some of the verses above could be read as formulaic: “a hundred autumns” prayers recur across the Vedic corpus, and the Rig Veda is not a diary. The line from Lopāmudrā is a dramatic persona, not a transcript; the poem may be a literary performance of a woman’s voice by a male poet. We cannot decide that. What we can say is that the complaint was heard as plausible and worth preserving.

What the Rig Veda Does Not Say

Three absences are worth marking, because they say as much as the verses.

1. No cult of youth. Nothing in the text asks that a mortal stay young. The prayers go the other way: toward a full old age. Youth belongs to gods (yuvāna, the standing epithet of the Maruts, the Rudras and Indra) and is something they carry out of sheer abundance.

2. No mourning of old age as such. The speakers regret aging’s effect on beauty and strength (Lopāmudrā, the poet at 5.41.15). They do not describe old age as shameful or as a moral failing. Where the old appear as old, as at 8.73.11 (purāṇavaj jaratoriva śasyate, a difficult verse in which praise is compared to that of aged ones), the comparison concerns the style of the praise, not the worth of the people.

3. No theory of why. The Upaniṣadic and later literature will work out what aging means; the Rig Veda has no account of its cause beyond the dawns. It simply lets the observation sit.

If you want a single sentence for the Rig Vedic attitude, it is closer to a clock than a lament: aging is what the days do to a person, the days are good, and the right response is to arrive at the end of them whole.

The Singer and the Aging Body

Return to the sound we started with. The poets call themselves jaritāraḥ, callers, and they call to Dawn. The goddess answers by making them old. That sounds like a bitter bargain, and one could imagine a different religion that built its theology on the bitterness.

What the Rig Veda builds instead is a quieter structure, and it has something to do with the vocabulary I laid out in the second section. A singer of praise (jaritṛ) is, in the sense of the verse at 1.113.11, one of an endless chain of watchers who rise, see the dawn once, and hand the watching over. The aging is the cost of being in the chain at all. The hymns are what the chain says to the one thing in the picture that goes on. Whether the sound-play between jarā “aging” and jarā “calling” was in anyone’s mind, the poet at 1.113.11 does not need it: the verse already says that each of us gets a handful of mornings and uses them to sing.

For a reader today the effect is odd and, I think, rather good. A text we usually describe as concerned with fire, drink, war and sacrifice turns out to include a thoughtful and unshowy reflection on bodily time, in which the first requirement is to be present for the sunrise. Two of its prayers (10.37.7 and 10.59.6) are literally requests to go on seeing the sun rise. The Rig Veda’s measure of a long life is an accumulation of dawns watched.

A reading recommendation. Take RV 1.113 outside before sunrise, with the verse about the earlier and later watchers (1.113.11) and Lopāmudrā’s first line (1.179.1) printed side by side. Read the first as the sky speaking and the second as the body replying. Then read RV 10.18.6, with its instruction to climb, in order, toward old age. For related reading in the collection, try Ushas for the dawn hymns, Women in the Rig Veda for Lopāmudrā’s company, and Tanu for the word the poets use for the body that is aging.