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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How to Make Friends With a God
The Rigveda's poets rarely call themselves servants of the gods. They call themselves friends, using a word that means alliance, obligation and risk. Sakhya runs through 226 hymns, and one poet even offers to sell Indra for ten cows.
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.
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.
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.
Who Has Ever Seen Him? The Rig Veda's Own Unbelievers
Three verses into a hymn of praise, the Rig Veda stops and quotes somebody saying the god is not real. The line was memorised, syllable by syllable, for three thousand years by people who did not believe it. This is what happens next.
Of the Same Age, in the Same Nest: The Maruts and the Indo-European War-Band
The Maruts are the Rigveda's storm troop: dozens of young men of one age, armed, loud, and devoted to Indra. A line of scholarship reads them as the divine mirror of a real institution, the Indo-European youth war-band. The reading is powerful, and its history is uncomfortable.
How to Kill a Dragon: Vṛtra and a Sentence Older Than Sanskrit
Three Vedic words, áhann áhim, encode a sentence that survives in Hittite, Greek, and Norse. The Vṛtra myth is not just Indra's story; it is the oldest plot the Indo-Europeans carried with them.
Cracking the Cave: The Vala Myth and the Recovery of the Dawn Cattle
A demon named Enclosure hides the cattle, the dawn, and the sun inside a rock. The gods break it open with song. This is the Rigveda's other great combat myth, and it argues that the universe is held together by correctly spoken words.
The Battle of the Ten Kings: Reading the Rigveda's Only War Report
On the banks of the Paruṣṇī, a Bharata king named Sudās broke a dam and drowned a coalition of ten tribes. The dāśarājña is the closest the Rigveda comes to history, and reading it tests the limits of what a hymn can tell us.
Dasas, Dasyus, and the Question of the Other: Who Were the Rigveda's Enemies?
The Rigveda names its opponents Dasas and Dasyus, but who were they? This article traces the textual evidence, the linguistic cognates, and 150 years of scholarly debate to show what we actually know and where the gaps remain.
Vishnu's Three Strides: How a Minor Rigvedic God Became Supreme
Vishnu commands only six dedicated hymns in the Rigveda, roughly half a percent of the corpus, yet he became the supreme deity of later Hinduism. How a striding solar ally of Indra transformed into the lord of the universe.
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.