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 One-Footed Goat and the Serpent of the Deep: The Rig Veda's Gods Without Stories
Two gods appear in the Rig Veda seventeen times between them, always in the same kind of verse, and nobody has ever known what they are. Not modern scholars, not Yaska in the fifth century BCE, quite possibly not the poets who named them.
Someone Sorted the Rigveda
The hymns of the Rigveda's oldest books are filed in strict descending order of length, group by group, like rows in a spreadsheet. Nine times in ten the order holds, and the places where it breaks turn out to be the seams where the collection grew.
How Far Is a Yojana? The Rig Veda Measures the World in Yokings and Cattle
The Rig Veda has no inch, no cubit, no ruler. Its two words for distance mean 'a harnessing' and 'the ground a cow walks', and in the whole collection exactly one verse attaches a number to either of them. What a civilisation chooses not to measure turns out to be as revealing as what it does.
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.
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.
What the Rigveda Hides: Concealment, Speech and the Limits of Knowing
Across roughly eighty verses the Rigveda's poets use one root, guh, 'to cover over'. Gods hide in water and wood, three quarters of speech are held back, and the creation hymn says the beginning itself was covered. This is not decoration. It is a theory of knowledge.
The House the Rigveda Never Describes
A night charm in Mandala 7 shuts a household's eyes 'as we shut this house' and then says nothing about the house. Across 10,500 verses the Rigveda names beds, doors and dogs but almost never a wall, a roof or a brick. What that silence is actually evidence of.
A Hymn to Gruel: What the Rigveda Actually Ate
The Rigveda contains one hymn addressed not to a god but to food itself, and it ends up praising porridge. Around it sits a food vocabulary with barley, ghee and honey everywhere, meat in three verses, and no word at all for rice, wheat or salt.
May I Die Today If I Am a Sorcerer: The Rigveda's Witchcraft Problem
The last hymn of Book Seven is not a prayer. It is a poet swearing on his own life that he is not a witch, and cursing the neighbour who said he was. Two hymns carry almost the entire vocabulary of Vedic sorcery.
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.