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 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.
A Bull, a Log, and the Woman Holding the Reins
One hymn in the Rigveda's tenth book reports a race. The team is a bull and a block of wood, the driver is a woman named Mudgalānī, and the bull urinates halfway down the track. Three thousand years of commentators have argued about what on earth is going on.
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.