Journeys into Vedic Thought
Long-form, researched essays on the deities, language, ritual and history of the Rig Veda. All free to read.
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Only the Sound Is Heard: The Rig Veda's God With No Shape
The Rig Veda gives the first cup of soma not to Indra but to the wind, a god its own poets say has never been seen. The hymns to Vāyu and Vāta show what Vedic thought did with a power detectable only by its effects.
The Fault Called Sameness: Jāmi and the Vedic Distrust of Things Too Alike
In the Rig Veda, jāmi means your sister. A few centuries later the same word is the technical name for a ritual mistake: two acts too much alike to produce anything. Following one word across that gap turns up a Vedic theory of what sameness can and cannot make.
Eight Words for a Vanished Band: Musical Instruments in the Rig Veda
The Rig Veda is the oldest music anyone still performs, and it is almost silent about instruments. Eight names survive in sixteen verses, three of them crammed into a single line that no two translators read the same way.
A Bull, a Log, and the Woman Holding the Reins
One hymn in the Rigveda's tenth book reports a race. The team is a bull and a block of wood, the driver is a woman named Mudgalānī, and the bull urinates halfway down the track. Three thousand years of commentators have argued about what on earth is going on.
The Gods Who Came to Collect: Debt in the Rig Veda
Twenty verses of the Rig Veda use the word ṛṇa, debt. Victorian translators turned most of them into sin and guilt. Restore the ledger and a harder world appears: creditor gods, a king named Debt-Collector, and a poet begging not to be billed for his brother's arrears.
The Sky Was Made of Stone
One Vedic word means 'stone'. Its Iranian cousin means 'sky'. Follow aśman through thirty Rigvedic verses and the weather stops being weather: thunder becomes a rock rolling overhead, lightning becomes fire struck out of flint, and rain has to be quarried.
Three Thousand Three Hundred and Thirty-Nine
A hymn to Agni pauses to give the number of gods who attended him. Not 'many', not 'countless': 3,339. Follow the Rigveda's numbers and you find a fully decimal counting system, a taste for oddly exact figures, and no way at all of writing any of it down.
The Two Mitras and the Two Varuṇas: The Rig Veda's Grammar of Pairs
Vedic Sanskrit has a separate grammatical form for exactly two, and the Rigveda's gods obey it. Fifty-seven hymns are addressed not to a god but to a couple, and the name of the most famous couple literally says 'the two Mitras, the two Varuṇas'.
The Tight Spot: What the Rig Veda Asks For When It Asks To Be Saved
The Rigveda's commonest word for trouble, aṃhas, literally means narrowness. Its commonest word for rescue means to make wide. Follow that one pair of words and the whole text starts to look like a set of instructions for getting out of tight places.
The Rig Veda Ends With a Meeting
After more than a thousand hymns to gods, storms and rivers, the Rigveda closes with four verses asking a group of people to agree. A few hymns earlier it preserves a charm for crushing the same gathering. Between them lies the oldest evidence for how Vedic people made decisions.
Māyā Before It Meant Illusion
Everyone knows māyā means illusion. The Rigveda does not. In roughly eighty verses the word names a hard, practical power to make forms and measure things out, and gods and demons wield it in equal measure.
The Guest Who Never Leaves: Hospitality and the Stranger in the Rig Veda
The Rig Veda has a word for guest. It uses it forty-four times, and in all but two of those the guest is not a person at all: it is the fire on the household hearth. Follow that oddity and a whole Bronze Age system for handling strangers comes into view.