Journeys into Vedic Thought
Long-form, researched essays on the deities, language, ritual and history of the Rig Veda. All free to read.
No articles match your search. Clear →
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.
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.
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.
The Racehorse Who Became a God: Dadhikrāvan in the Rigveda
Three consecutive hymns of the Rigveda praise a named horse called Dadhikrāvan, with the dust, the reins and the shouting crowd all in place. One of those verses is still recited every morning by people who have no idea they are complimenting an animal.
What Tree Did They Cut the World From? The Rigveda's Life in Wood
A Rigvedic poet asks which tree the universe was carved out of, and asks it twice. The question turns out to be technical, not mystical: these were people who knew exactly which timber goes into an axle, and who spoke to their tools.
A Hundred Jars from a Horse's Hoof: The Rigveda's Other Intoxicant
The Rigveda devotes an entire book to soma. It mentions surā, the grain beer people actually drank, in seven verses, and two of those are disputed. The silence turns out to be the most informative thing about it.
The Fault Called Sameness: Jāmi and the Vedic Distrust of Things Too Alike
In the Rig Veda, jāmi means your sister. A few centuries later the same word is the technical name for a ritual mistake: two acts too much alike to produce anything. Following one word across that gap turns up a Vedic theory of what sameness can and cannot make.
Eight Words for a Vanished Band: Musical Instruments in the Rig Veda
The Rig Veda is the oldest music anyone still performs, and it is almost silent about instruments. Eight names survive in sixteen verses, three of them crammed into a single line that no two translators read the same way.
Three Thousand Three Hundred and Thirty-Nine
A hymn to Agni pauses to give the number of gods who attended him. Not 'many', not 'countless': 3,339. Follow the Rigveda's numbers and you find a fully decimal counting system, a taste for oddly exact figures, and no way at all of writing any of it down.
The Guest Who Never Leaves: Hospitality and the Stranger in the Rig Veda
The Rig Veda has a word for guest. It uses it forty-four times, and in all but two of those the guest is not a person at all: it is the fire on the household hearth. Follow that oddity and a whole Bronze Age system for handling strangers comes into view.
Seven Cups, Seven Jobs: The Org Chart Buried in the Rig Veda
Two Rigvedic hymns invite a god to drink, one stanza at a time, from six differently owned cups. Each cup belongs to a different job title. Buried in the liturgy is the oldest surviving description of a specialist work team, and its lopsided arithmetic gives away who wrote it.
The Tenth Month: How the Rig Veda Talks About Being Born
The Rig Veda uses the word for womb about seventy times and the word for embryo about a hundred, almost always to describe fire, dawn or the sky. In four short hymns it drops the metaphor and speaks about an actual woman in labour, and those verses are the plainest lines in the book.