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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Something Bit Me in the Dark: The Rigveda's Hymn Against the Unseen
The last hymn of the Rigveda's first book is not addressed to a god. It is a charm against creatures too small to see, and it names a category of enemy defined entirely by invisibility. The word for them appears nowhere else in the collection.
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.
Carpentered Young Again: What the Rigveda Says When a Body Breaks
The Rigveda's poets describe damaged human bodies with the vocabulary of the workshop: fitted, fashioned, set flowing again. Behind that habit sits a fixed formula, the blind and the lame, that three different gods are credited with undoing.
A Hundred and Seven Homes: The Rigveda's Forgotten Physician
One Rigvedic poet lists his family: he writes verse, his mother grinds grain, his father is a doctor. Medicine is the trade the Rigveda almost never gets credit for, and the hymn that preserves it is one of the strangest things in the collection.