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 God Named 'Who': An Invitation to the Rigveda's Great Questions
A hymn ends nine times with the same unanswered question, and centuries later Vedic tradition answered it by inventing a god literally named 'Who?'. That small scandal is the best doorway into the Rigveda.
The Riddle Hymn: Reading RV 1.164, the Rigveda's Great Puzzle
A blind poet named Long-Darkness packed fifty-two verses with wheels, birds, and hidden speech, then dared the priests to solve them. One line from that hymn became the most quoted sentence in Indian religion. Here is what it actually says.
Fashioned Like a Chariot: How the Rigveda's Poets Built a Poem
The oldest poets in the Indo-European world did not think they were channeling the gods. They thought they were building. Their favorite word for making a hymn was takṣ, 'to carpenter', and it changes how you read every line.
The Sister Nobody Sang To: The Rigveda's One Hymn to Night (RV 10.127)
The Rigveda gives Dawn some twenty hymns and her sister Night exactly one. This is a close reading of that lone hymn to Rātrī, why the poets sang so little to the dark, and how a minor Vedic goddess grew into the cosmic Night of later Hinduism.
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.
Ushas: Goddess of Dawn and the Most Beautiful Poetry of the Rig Veda
The dawn-hymns of the Rig Veda are widely considered the corpus's finest poetry. Ushas — Uṣas — is praised in twenty hymns of unusual lyricism. A reading of the dawn-cycle and what makes it the high-water mark of Vedic verse.