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.
Seven Verses That Smell: The Rigveda's Missing Sense
The most widely chanted verse of the Rigveda calls a god sweet smelling. It is one of only seven verses in the entire collection that use a word for smell at all, and the other six are stranger than the silence around them.
The Rigveda's Word for Like Is Also Its Word for No
The Rigveda builds thousands of its images with a particle that also means 'not'. Nothing in the spelling, the accent or the grammar of the word separates the two. Only where it stands in the line tells you whether the poet is comparing or denying.
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 Rigveda's Accidental Census: What Its Personal Names Give Away
The Rigveda's hymns were carefully shaped. The personal names inside them were not. Read the poets, patrons and outsiders by name and a different society appears: one with foreign donors, joke names, blind bards and women who exist only as grammatical operations on a husband.
The Beast With a Hand: The Rig Veda's Missing Tiger and the Animals Its Poets Could Not Name
Search the whole Rig Veda for the word tiger and you get nothing. Search for lion and you get fifteen verses. The elephant appears twice, and only as 'the wild beast with a hand.' The pattern is an accidental archive of what its poets had actually seen.
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.
Cartographers of the Vedas: Two Centuries of Scholarship on the Rigvedic River Names
From Christian Lassen in 1847 to satellite imagery in the 2010s. A history of the scholarly project to identify the rivers named in the Nadistuti (Rigveda 10.75) and to map them onto the modern landscape of north-west South Asia.