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 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.
The Knot on the Right: What the Rigveda Wore
A Rigvedic hymn identifies an entire priestly family by their hairstyle. Follow the text's clothing words and you find a wool economy, a loom with pegs driven into the ground, exactly one needle, and the metaphor that eventually gave Sanskrit the words sutra and tantra.
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.
The God You Pray Away: Rudra, the Archer Who Heals, and the Long Prehistory of Śiva
Rudra gets only three hymns in the Rigveda, yet he is the most carefully handled god in the collection. The poets praise his arrows so he will aim them elsewhere, and call him kind so he will become so. This is how a feared archer turned into Śiva.