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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Homage Rules the Gods: The Rigveda's Strangest Offering
In the Rigveda, namas is not a feeling and not a greeting. It is a thing poets carry to the fire alongside firewood and butter, a substance that holds up the earth and sky, cancels sin, and gets paid to a handful of gambling nuts.
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.
Devas into Demons: The Rigveda, the Avesta, and the Asura-Daeva Reversal
The Rigveda and the Avesta share almost the same vocabulary of gods and demons, but the words point in opposite directions. What Indian priests came to call demons, Iranian priests called their supreme god, and vice versa. This is the story of a single Indo-Iranian schism, told through the actual verses on both sides.
Apām Napāt, the Child of the Waters: A God of Fire Born from the Flood
One Rigvedic hymn, RV 2.35, praises a golden god who shines without fuel at the bottom of the waters. Apām Napāt is the strangest figure in the Vedic pantheon, and the key to a fire-in-water myth older than India itself.
Are the Vedas Older Than the Bible? A Chronology of the World's Sacred Texts
The question 'which is older, the Vedas or the Bible?' turns out to be the wrong question. The right question is: older in what sense? Oral composition, written fixation, and final redaction give three different answers, and the gap between them can span a millennium. Here is the evidence, tradition by tradition.
Indra's 250 Hymns: War-God, Rain-Bringer, or Something Else Entirely?
Indra dominates the Rigveda like no other deity: roughly a quarter of the corpus is addressed to him. Yet the Indra of the hymns is stranger and more varied than the dragon-slayer of popular summary. He is a rain-bringer, a cosmic orderer, a drunkard, a doubter, and eventually a god whom later Hinduism will quietly demote.
The Soma Problem: What Did the Vedic Poets Actually Drink?
Mandala 9 of the Rigveda devotes 114 hymns to a single plant pressed, filtered and drunk at sacrifice. For over a century scholars have tried to identify it. The candidates include a psychoactive mushroom, a harmal shrub, ephedra, and cannabis. The hymns themselves may be the best evidence we have.
The Rig Veda and the Avesta: Shared Indo-Iranian Heritage of Hindus and Zoroastrians
The Rig Veda and the Zoroastrian Avesta are sister texts. Their languages, gods, rituals and even individual poetic lines preserve a common Indo-Iranian heritage that predates the split into Vedic and Iranian religion.