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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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.
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.
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.
Man Overboard: The Rig Veda's Shipwreck and the Sea That Should Not Be There
A man is abandoned in open water and carried home in a ship with a hundred oars. The Rig Veda tells this story in fourteen hymns, from a world with no coastline. What its poets actually knew about the sea turns out to be a harder question than either side of the old argument admits.
The Nightmare You Could Give Away: How the Rigveda Handled Bad Dreams
Bronze Age Egypt and Mesopotamia read dreams as coded messages. The Rigveda does something stranger: it treats a bad dream as a substance you can gather up like a debt and hand to somebody else. Eight verses, one obscure god, and a question about guilt that nobody has answered since.
The Prop Under the Sky: What Dharma Meant Before It Meant Duty
In the Rigveda, dharma is not a moral code. It is a load-bearing noun, the physical thing that keeps heaven and earth from collapsing into each other. It appears sixty-three times, mostly in the youngest hymns, and one translator rendered it seven different ways in a single book.
Devas into Demons: The Rigveda, the Avesta, and the Asura-Daeva Reversal
The Rigveda and the Avesta share almost the same vocabulary of gods and demons, but the words point in opposite directions. What Indian priests came to call demons, Iranian priests called their supreme god, and vice versa. This is the story of a single Indo-Iranian schism, told through the actual verses on both sides.
Varuna: The Watchful God and the Invention of Cosmic Guilt
Varuna is the only Rigvedic god who makes his worshippers feel guilty. A close reading of his hymns, his thousand-eyed surveillance network, his noose, and the strange arc from supreme cosmic sovereign to minor water deity.