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.
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.
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 Two Mitras and the Two Varuṇas: The Rig Veda's Grammar of Pairs
Vedic Sanskrit has a separate grammatical form for exactly two, and the Rigveda's gods obey it. Fifty-seven hymns are addressed not to a god but to a couple, and the name of the most famous couple literally says 'the two Mitras, the two Varuṇas'.
The Tight Spot: What the Rig Veda Asks For When It Asks To Be Saved
The Rigveda's commonest word for trouble, aṃhas, literally means narrowness. Its commonest word for rescue means to make wide. Follow that one pair of words and the whole text starts to look like a set of instructions for getting out of tight places.
Māyā Before It Meant Illusion
Everyone knows māyā means illusion. The Rigveda does not. In roughly eighty verses the word names a hard, practical power to make forms and measure things out, and gods and demons wield it in equal measure.
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.
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.
Vedic Sanskrit Accent: Udatta, Anudatta, Svarita — The Tonal System That Preserved the Veda
Vedic Sanskrit, unlike classical Sanskrit, has a pitch accent. The three-tone system of udātta, anudātta and svarita is the key to the metrical and lexical precision of the Rig Veda, and the reason oral recitation has preserved the text so faithfully.