The Rig Veda Blog
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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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 God Inside the Slaughtered Horse: Reading the Aśvamedha Hymns (RV 1.162–1.163)
Two Rigvedic hymns, RV 1.162 and 1.163, narrate the killing of a horse and then insist the horse does not die. Read together, they open onto an Indo-European ritual older than India, a royal theater of sovereignty, and a quiet anatomy lesson hidden in a sacred poem.