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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Homage Rules the Gods: The Rigveda's Strangest Offering
In the Rigveda, namas is not a feeling and not a greeting. It is a thing poets carry to the fire alongside firewood and butter, a substance that holds up the earth and sky, cancels sin, and gets paid to a handful of gambling nuts.
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.
A Verb With No When
The Rigveda has a finite verb form that carries no tense and no mood. Sanskrit later lost it almost completely, and the one place it survived is the word every Indian language still uses to say 'don't'.
The Sky Was Made of Stone
One Vedic word means 'stone'. Its Iranian cousin means 'sky'. Follow aśman through thirty Rigvedic verses and the weather stops being weather: thunder becomes a rock rolling overhead, lightning becomes fire struck out of flint, and rain has to be quarried.
Sweetness Before Sugar: Honey, Bees, and the Secret the Aśvins Stole
The Rigveda has no word for sugar. It has madhu, honey, roughly 250 times, and in four strange verses an actual bee shows up carrying a secret. Following that word leads to wild honey hunting, a severed horse's head, and a drink the Vedic poets may have lost.
The Rigveda Has No Word for West
Sanskrit's ordinary word for west, paścimā, never appears in the Rigveda. Its poets located themselves with a different set of words: in front, behind, above, below, and the right hand. The result is a map of the world drawn from a standing body facing the sunrise.
Eleven Names Before the Knife: The Āprī Hymns and the Fixed Grammar of Vedic Sacrifice
Ten short, formulaic Rigvedic hymns recited before every solemn animal sacrifice name the same eleven ritual entities in almost the same order, except for one deliberate swap that marks out priestly family lines. That single variable is the most interesting fact in the corpus.