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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Homage Rules the Gods: The Rigveda's Strangest Offering
In the Rigveda, namas is not a feeling and not a greeting. It is a thing poets carry to the fire alongside firewood and butter, a substance that holds up the earth and sky, cancels sin, and gets paid to a handful of gambling nuts.
I Take Counsel With My Own Body: The Rigveda's Word for Self
When a Rigvedic poet needs to say I asked myself, he says he consulted his body. The word is tanū, from a root meaning to stretch, and it does the work that atman would later do. Watching the handover happen changes what the Veda looks like.
Seven Verses That Smell: The Rigveda's Missing Sense
The most widely chanted verse of the Rigveda calls a god sweet smelling. It is one of only seven verses in the entire collection that use a word for smell at all, and the other six are stranger than the silence around them.
Something Bit Me in the Dark: The Rigveda's Hymn Against the Unseen
The last hymn of the Rigveda's first book is not addressed to a god. It is a charm against creatures too small to see, and it names a category of enemy defined entirely by invisibility. The word for them appears nowhere else in the collection.
The Racehorse Who Became a God: Dadhikrāvan in the Rigveda
Three consecutive hymns of the Rigveda praise a named horse called Dadhikrāvan, with the dust, the reins and the shouting crowd all in place. One of those verses is still recited every morning by people who have no idea they are complimenting an animal.
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 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.
What Tree Did They Cut the World From? The Rigveda's Life in Wood
A Rigvedic poet asks which tree the universe was carved out of, and asks it twice. The question turns out to be technical, not mystical: these were people who knew exactly which timber goes into an axle, and who spoke to their tools.
A Hundred Jars from a Horse's Hoof: The Rigveda's Other Intoxicant
The Rigveda devotes an entire book to soma. It mentions surā, the grain beer people actually drank, in seven verses, and two of those are disputed. The silence turns out to be the most informative thing about it.
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.
A Verb With No When
The Rigveda has a finite verb form that carries no tense and no mood. Sanskrit later lost it almost completely, and the one place it survived is the word every Indian language still uses to say 'don't'.
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.