If the Rigvedic Rishis Had Social Media: Tweets, DMs and Reviews from the Vedic Age

A note before we begin

This piece is playful. Every joke below is, however, anchored in a real Rigvedic verse, with the hymn cited so you can read the source. The Rigveda is not a solemn text from end to end. It contains gossip, complaint, sexual innuendo, dance, sarcasm, and at least one openly satirical poem (the Frogs hymn). Frits Staal observed in Discovering the Vedas that ‘levity in the Veda is not the exception but a recurring register’, and that the dialogue hymns in particular preserve a colloquial voice that the later tradition smoothed away. [1] The exercise that follows is an attempt to hear that voice through a modern medium that happens to be built for conversation, complaint and performance: social media.

Cast of characters

Our regulars:

Tweets from the pantheon

@Indra_King after RV 1.32

Slew the dragon. Released the waters. Split the mountain. All in one afternoon. Soma’s flowing, the cows are out, the sun is up. Don’t @ me.

Replies: 47 likes, 3 retweets, one quote-tweet from @DanusGrief reading ‘Like a cow over its calf I lie above my dead son.’ (That is the actual line, RV 1.32.9. Even at his most triumphant moment Indra is given an enemy whose mother grieves. The Vedic poet is unusually generous with the opposition.) [2]

@Agni_Hotr, daily

Tagged in another offering. That’s six this morning. Reminder: I am literally a messenger. If you don’t put a deity in the address line I can’t deliver.

Agni’s job description is right there in his epithets: havyavāhana (‘offering-carrier’), devadūta (‘messenger of the gods’), purohita (‘placed in front’). Rig Veda 1.1, the corpus’s opening hymn, calls him hotṛ (‘the invoker, the one who calls’). He is, essentially, Vedic logistics.

@Soma_Pavamana from inside the woollen filter

Just spent the morning getting pressed between two stones, filtered through sheep’s wool, and mixed with milk. The hymns of Mandala 9 are all about me. Talk to me again when you’ve been the subject of 114 hymns in a row.

All of Mandala 9 is the Soma Pavamāna (‘Soma in the process of being purified’) cycle. The ritual reality behind the hymns is real and recoverable, see Soma: The Divine Plant of the Rig Veda.

@Varuna_Watches

Two friends are speaking together; I am the third nobody sees. Two are walking together; I am with them. A man sits alone and speaks to himself; I am there too.

That is not a tweet, it is Rig Veda 4.16.2 and Atharva Veda 4.16.2-3, almost verbatim. Varuṇa is the original surveillance god. He has spies (spaśaḥ) in the heavens and on the earth. The hymns to him are unusually ethical for the Rigveda: confession, fear, appeal for forgiveness. Macdonell long ago called Varuṇa ‘the most distinctly moral conception of the Vedic pantheon.’ [3]

@UshasDawn, sunrise

The mortals who saw me yesterday are gone. The mortals seeing me now will go too. The mortals who will see me in the days to come will also go. I will still be here.

Rig Veda 1.113.11, barely paraphrased. One of the corpus’s quietest and most devastating verses. The dawn does not feel sorry for anyone.

DMs that aged poorly

@YamiVaivasvati to @YamaLordOfDeath

Rig Veda 10.10 is one of the strangest hymns in the corpus: a dialogue between Yamī and her twin brother Yama in which she proposes that they have children together and he refuses. It is fourteen verses long and the argument runs both ways. Imagine it as a thread:

@YamiVaivasvati: We are the only two there are. The gods made us a couple in the womb. Come, Yama. Let us be husband and wife.

@YamaLordOfDeath: We were made twins in the womb. That does not make us a couple. Your spies of Mitra and Varuṇa would not allow it.

@YamiVaivasvati: Among the gods, what is forbidden elsewhere is permitted. Aren’t you tempted, even a little?

@YamaLordOfDeath: I shall not be tempted. Go and seek a husband who is not your brother.

The hymn is the earliest explicit textual statement of the Indian incest taboo, and it gives Yamī the more emotionally complex voice. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty’s reading places it in dialogue with Iranian cosmogonic mythology (the Avestan Yima and his sister Yimak, who do marry in some recensions, are the cognate pair). [4] This is not a hymn later devotional tradition liked to chant.

@Lopamudra subtweets @Agastya

Rig Veda 1.179 is a hymn in which the Rishika Lopāmudrā complains to her ascetic husband, the Rishi Agastya, that he has been so absorbed in his austerities that he has neglected her as a wife. The first verse is hers:

Many autumns I have toiled, night and day, dawns aging me. Old age dims the beauty of bodies. Husbands should be with their wives.

Agastya replies that yes, ascetics also have duties to their wives. The hymn ends with their reconciliation. As a thread:

@Lopamudra: I have been at it for many autumns. The dawns are doing their work on me. I’m not going to wait forever.

@Agastya: You are right. Asceticism is not the only duty.

This is one of the corpus’s clearest preserved female voices, and it is a complaint. (For more on this terrain, see Hidden Women of the Rigveda and Women in the Rig Veda.)

@UrvasiApsaras leaves @Pururavas on read

Rig Veda 10.95 records the departure of the celestial nymph Urvaśī from her mortal husband Purūravas. Purūravas pleads; Urvaśī is unyielding. Her line, verse 15: ‘There are no friendships with women. They have the hearts of jackals.’ It is the Rigveda’s most quoted misogynist verse, and the most ironic, because it is spoken by a woman in a dialogue hymn composed (according to the Anukramaṇī) by the woman herself. The verse is a self-portrait of a goddess who is leaving, telling the man she is leaving why she cannot be held. [5] Later quotation of this verse, stripped from its dialogue context, is the standard textbook example of how a hymn’s reception can invert its meaning.

Reviews and Yelp pages

Soma, the divine drink. 4.9 / 5 stars.

Sample reviews (paraphrased from Mandala 9):

• ‘Tastes like exhilaration. Recommend with milk and curds. Five out of five.’ (RV 9.86)
• ‘Drank some and immediately wrote a hymn. The Pavamāna was just flowing through me.’ (RV 9.114)
• ‘Made me feel one with Indra. Bought it from a Soma merchant who refused to negotiate (RV 4.24.10, the one passage that records actual Soma haggling).’
• ‘Mountain-shrub, juice extracted between two stones, filtered through wool. Modern scholarship leans towards Ephedra. (See Soma: The Divine Plant of the Rig Veda for the 130-year debate.)’

@AshvinsMD on Doctor Twitter

The Aśvins (twin horse-headed healer-gods) appear in the corpus as the divine first-responders. Rig Veda 1.116-119 collects their rescue feats:

Restored Cyavāna to youth. Gave Vispalā an iron leg after her old one was cut off in battle. Rescued Bhujyu from the ocean using a winged ship. Cured Paravṛj, the blind and lame, simultaneously. DM us your case.

The Vispalā story (RV 1.116.15) is the earliest textual reference in any Indo-European literature to a prosthetic limb. The hymn says she received an iron leg (jaṅgha) from the Aśvins and went back into the war chariot. [6]

The Frogs hymn goes viral

Rig Veda 7.103, known as the Frogs hymn (Maṇḍūka Sūkta), is the closest thing the corpus has to a stand-up routine. After the long dry season, the monsoon comes and the frogs begin to call all at once. The poet, Vasiṣṭha (the very Rishi to whom Mandala 7 is attributed), watches them and notices something:

They have lain quiet for a year, fulfilling their vows. Now the rains have come; they speak together; their voices rise. Like Brahmins around the Soma bowl when the new ritual begins, they sit and call out, one after another.

One repeats the call of the other, as a pupil his teacher’s lesson. When one of you speaks, the other answers, like men reciting praises at the sacrifice.

It is impossible to read RV 7.103 and not hear gentle ribbing. The frogs are like the priests. They sit in a circle, they wait for the right ritual season, they recite in call-and-response, they get loud after the first drink. Maurice Bloomfield, the great American Sanskritist, called it ‘the earliest piece of consciously humorous verse in any Indo-European literature.’ [7] Some scholars have read it as a satire of priestly self-importance; others, more cautiously, as a celebratory hymn that uses the priest analogy admiringly. The text supports both readings. Either way the gentle, observant smile of the poem is unmistakable. It is the verse to read out loud to anyone who thinks the Veda is humourless.

The dānastuti as humblebrag

A peculiar Rigvedic sub-genre is the dānastuti (‘praise of the gift’), where a poet who has just received a generous fee from a king or chieftain composes a verse specifically thanking the donor by name and listing what was given. It is the world’s first paid product placement, or the world’s oldest grateful-acknowledgement verse, depending on how charitable a reader you are.

RV 6.45.31-33 records the poet receiving ‘two reddish-brown horses with manes tossing, a hundred cows from the herd, garments and ornaments’ from a patron named Bṛbu. RV 8.46.21-24 lists ‘sixty thousand head of cattle, sixty horses, ten chariots and ten servants’ from a chief named Vasa Aśvya. The numbers are very probably inflated; the gratitude is sincere; and the form of the verse, the public list of gifts, has the unmistakable energy of a modern sponsored post. [8]

If you imagine it on social media:

Massive thank-you to @KingBrbu for the two reddish-brown horses, the hundred cows, and the gold chains. Your support of the arts is unmatched. #blessed #dānastuti

@LadyVac takes the mic (RV 10.125)

The Rigveda’s most striking first-person performance is the Devī Sūkta, Rig Veda 10.125, traditionally composed by Vāc Āmbhṛṇī, in which the goddess of speech, Vāc, declares herself the underlying reality of every other deity:

I move with the Rudras and the Vasus. I uphold Mitra and Varuṇa, Indra and Agni, the Aśvins. I am the sovereign queen, the gatherer of wealth. Everyone who sees, who breathes, who hears, who speaks, lives in me. Listen, even the famous: I am telling you what is worth believing.

As a social media post it would simply be:

Read the room. I am the room.

There is no Rigvedic verse that is more confident, more first-person, or more theologically consequential. The Devī Sūkta is the seed of the later goddess theology (the Devī Māhātmya, the Tantric Śākta traditions). It is also one of the comparatively few hymns spoken not about a deity but as the deity. [9]

Why this exercise is not disrespectful

Three reasons it is reasonable to read the Rigveda this way.

First, the Vedic poets themselves used dialogue, complaint, humour and self-deprecation. The Frogs hymn is signed by Vasiṣṭha. The Vṛṣākapi hymn (RV 10.86) is sexually frank and openly funny. The dānastutis are unembarrassed about naming patrons and prices. To pretend that the Veda is uniformly solemn is to mishear what is on the page. [10]

Second, every hymn cited above is a real hymn that you can open and read. The exercise is paraphrase, not invention. The aim is to make the texture and tone of the original audible to a reader who has been told for a long time that the Veda is dry.

Third, the conversational forms the Veda preserves are what makes the corpus humanly accessible. Yamī asking, Lopāmudrā complaining, Urvaśī leaving, Vāc declaring, Vasiṣṭha watching the frogs come out of the puddles after the first monsoon rain. These are voices speaking in a register modern readers recognise. The medium has changed; the speech has not.

Open the Frogs hymn at Rig Veda 7.103. Open the Vāc hymn at Rig Veda 10.125. Bring the rest of the timeline with you.