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 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.
Only the Sound Is Heard: The Rig Veda's God With No Shape
The Rig Veda gives the first cup of soma not to Indra but to the wind, a god its own poets say has never been seen. The hymns to Vāyu and Vāta show what Vedic thought did with a power detectable only by its effects.
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.
Who Has Ever Seen Him? The Rig Veda's Own Unbelievers
Three verses into a hymn of praise, the Rig Veda stops and quotes somebody saying the god is not real. The line was memorised, syllable by syllable, for three thousand years by people who did not believe it. This is what happens next.
May I Die Today If I Am a Sorcerer: The Rigveda's Witchcraft Problem
The last hymn of Book Seven is not a prayer. It is a poet swearing on his own life that he is not a witch, and cursing the neighbour who said he was. Two hymns carry almost the entire vocabulary of Vedic sorcery.
The Word That Became Zen Appears Once in the Rigveda
The ancestor of dhyāna, jhāna and zen turns up exactly one time in the Rigveda, and not where anyone expects: in a workshop, describing craftsmen who built a chariot out of their minds. What the oldest Indian poetry actually says about attention is stranger, and more useful, than the version on the meditation app.
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.
Yoke First, Posture Later: What the Rigveda Actually Says About Yoga
The oldest surviving use of the word yoga has nothing to do with mats or breathing. It means backing two horses under a wooden crossbar before dawn. Following that word from a Bronze Age harness to Patanjali reveals a stranger and better story than the one on the studio wall.
Four Verbs in the Past Tense: The Rigveda's Only First-Person Report of Immortality
Somewhere around 1200 BCE a poet wrote down four verbs and claimed, in the past tense, that he and his companions had already become deathless. Nobody has ever agreed on what he meant. The argument runs from Sayana in the fourteenth century to a Dutch Indologist in 1994, and it turns on a single grammatical form.
A Hundred Autumns: The Rigveda's Argument Against Dying
The Rigveda's word for immortality is a negative: a-mṛta, not-dead. Even the gods had to earn it, some of them by doing excellent metalwork. And the poets who coined the word spent almost no time asking for heaven. They asked, over and over, for a hundred more autumns of this.