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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The Bowstring Whispers: The Rigveda's Hymn to Its Own Weapons
The last hymn of Mandala 6 addresses no god at all. It talks to a bow, a quiver, a whip, a leather arm-guard and a handful of arrows, one object at a time, and ends by saying the only real armour is a sentence.
Hymns to Nouns: The Rigveda's Gods of Faith, Fury and the Fee
Late in the Rigveda, poets stop addressing rivers and storms and start addressing qualities. There are hymns to Fury, to Trust, and to the priest's honorarium. This is where Indian abstraction begins, and it happens in the vocative case.
Man Overboard: The Rig Veda's Shipwreck and the Sea That Should Not Be There
A man is abandoned in open water and carried home in a ship with a hundred oars. The Rig Veda tells this story in fourteen hymns, from a world with no coastline. What its poets actually knew about the sea turns out to be a harder question than either side of the old argument admits.
Carpentered Young Again: What the Rigveda Says When a Body Breaks
The Rigveda's poets describe damaged human bodies with the vocabulary of the workshop: fitted, fashioned, set flowing again. Behind that habit sits a fixed formula, the blind and the lame, that three different gods are credited with undoing.
Ille Loquitur: Two Centuries of Getting the Rigveda Into European Languages
Europe's first Veda was a Jesuit forgery Voltaire owned. The English Rigveda most people read today was finished in 1896 by a translator who hid two verses in Latin, and it dominates the internet for one reason: the copyright expired.
The Fallow Strip: The Rigveda's Apocrypha and the Hymn to Lakṣmī That Is Not in the Rigveda
Millions recite the Śrī Sūkta every Diwali as a Rigvedic hymn. Open a printed Rigveda and it is not there. It belongs to the khilas, a shadow collection of hymns parked just outside the canon, and nobody can agree how many of them exist.
Cry From the South of Our Houses: The Rigveda's Bird Oracles
The Rigveda has almost no divination in it: no liver reading, no oracle lots, no omen manual. Then, in three hymns tucked into the margins, a partridge is asked to speak and a pigeon is treated as a message from death.
The Nightmare You Could Give Away: How the Rigveda Handled Bad Dreams
Bronze Age Egypt and Mesopotamia read dreams as coded messages. The Rigveda does something stranger: it treats a bad dream as a substance you can gather up like a debt and hand to somebody else. Eight verses, one obscure god, and a question about guilt that nobody has answered since.
The Rigveda's Accidental Census: What Its Personal Names Give Away
The Rigveda's hymns were carefully shaped. The personal names inside them were not. Read the poets, patrons and outsiders by name and a different society appears: one with foreign donors, joke names, blind bards and women who exist only as grammatical operations on a husband.
The Beast With a Hand: The Rig Veda's Missing Tiger and the Animals Its Poets Could Not Name
Search the whole Rig Veda for the word tiger and you get nothing. Search for lion and you get fifteen verses. The elephant appears twice, and only as 'the wild beast with a hand.' The pattern is an accidental archive of what its poets had actually seen.
A Hundred and Seven Homes: The Rigveda's Forgotten Physician
One Rigvedic poet lists his family: he writes verse, his mother grinds grain, his father is a doctor. Medicine is the trade the Rigveda almost never gets credit for, and the hymn that preserves it is one of the strangest things in the collection.
The Word That Became Zen Appears Once in the Rigveda
The ancestor of dhyāna, jhāna and zen turns up exactly one time in the Rigveda, and not where anyone expects: in a workshop, describing craftsmen who built a chariot out of their minds. What the oldest Indian poetry actually says about attention is stranger, and more useful, than the version on the meditation app.