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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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.
Hard to Catch as the Wind: The Rigveda's Oldest Love Story
In eighteen verses of Rigveda 10.95, a mortal king begs a vanishing celestial nymph to stay, and she refuses. It may be the oldest recorded lovers' quarrel in any Indo-European language, and the seed of the swan-maiden tale told from Sweden to Japan.
The God Who Fell Silent: Dyaus Pita and the Faded Sky Father
Dyaus is the one Rigvedic god whose name we can pronounce with confidence across five thousand years: he is Zeus, he is Jupiter. Yet in the Rigveda he has no hymn of his own. This is the story of the Sky Father who ruled everywhere else and dissolved into the background in India.
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.
Mitra: The Contract God and the Oldest Dated Witness to a Vedic Name
Mitra owns exactly one hymn in the Rigveda, yet his name is the earliest dated trace of any Vedic deity, scratched into a Hittite treaty around 1380 BCE. This is the story of a god who binds, and what a clay tablet in Anatolia tells us about when the Veda was young.
Pūṣan, Lord of the Paths: The Gruel-Eating God Who May Be Greek Pan's Cousin
Pūṣan is the Rigveda's god of roads, lost cattle, weddings and the road of the dead. A toothless herdsman who rides a goat-cart and eats porridge, he also sits at the centre of one of comparative mythology's oldest and most stubborn puzzles: is he a cousin of the Greek god Pan?
The God Inside the Slaughtered Horse: Reading the Aśvamedha Hymns (RV 1.162–1.163)
Two Rigvedic hymns, RV 1.162 and 1.163, narrate the killing of a horse and then insist the horse does not die. Read together, they open onto an Indo-European ritual older than India, a royal theater of sovereignty, and a quiet anatomy lesson hidden in a sacred poem.
Apām Napāt, the Child of the Waters: A God of Fire Born from the Flood
One Rigvedic hymn, RV 2.35, praises a golden god who shines without fuel at the bottom of the waters. Apām Napāt is the strangest figure in the Vedic pantheon, and the key to a fire-in-water myth older than India itself.
The Body That Became the World: Reading the Puruṣa Sūkta (RV 10.90)
A late Rigvedic hymn imagines the universe built from a dismembered giant, and in one verse derives the four social classes from his body. Here is what the text actually says, why scholars date it late, and how it preserves a creation myth older than Sanskrit.
Of the Same Age, in the Same Nest: The Maruts and the Indo-European War-Band
The Maruts are the Rigveda's storm troop: dozens of young men of one age, armed, loud, and devoted to Indra. A line of scholarship reads them as the divine mirror of a real institution, the Indo-European youth war-band. The reading is powerful, and its history is uncomfortable.
How to Kill a Dragon: Vṛtra and a Sentence Older Than Sanskrit
Three Vedic words, áhann áhim, encode a sentence that survives in Hittite, Greek, and Norse. The Vṛtra myth is not just Indra's story; it is the oldest plot the Indo-Europeans carried with them.