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 Rigveda's Word for Like Is Also Its Word for No
The Rigveda builds thousands of its images with a particle that also means 'not'. Nothing in the spelling, the accent or the grammar of the word separates the two. Only where it stands in the line tells you whether the poet is comparing or denying.
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.
Green Mouths and Singing Stones: Inside the Rigveda's Soma Workshop
Most writing about soma asks what the plant was. Ask instead how it was made, and a Bronze Age workshop appears: stalks bought off a cart, stones with green mouths, pits dug in the ground to amplify the noise, and a fleece filter that turned a juice into a god.
The Filtered God: Why the Rigveda Built an Entire Book Around Soma Passing Through Wool
Mandala 9 of the Rigveda is its strangest book: 114 hymns to a single deity, Soma Pavamana, defined not by a poet-family but by one ritual instant, juice straining through a sheep's-fleece sieve. That editorial decision reveals how the collection was assembled.
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.
Soma: The Divine Plant of the Rig Veda — The 130-Year Identification Debate
What was Soma? The Rig Veda devotes an entire Mandala to it, but we no longer know what plant it was. A survey of the major candidates — from R. Gordon Wasson's Amanita muscaria to modern ephedra theories.