“There was neither death nor immortality then. There was no distinguishing sign of night nor day. That one breathed, windless, by its own nature. Other than that, there was nothing beyond.” (Doniger 25)
Picture a horse. Not a show horse, mind, not one of today’s sleek, long-legged quarter horses: this is a sturdy little trooper, born and raised on the plains below the foothills of the Himalayas, some three thousand years ago. He is a stallion. He’s pale brown, most likely, with a white muzzle. His mane has been adorned with golden ornaments. His coat has been anointed with precious golden butter. He is a champion, and now he will complete one last ride for the people who tamed him.
The horse’s large, liquid brown eyes reflect the light of three fires his people have lit. These fires burn in the center of a circle of wagons, chariots, and tents – the encampment of a band of herders, braced against the oncoming night. In the space between the three fires a stake has been planted in the ground. A group of priests are laying out hooks, pots, bowls, knives. There is a stretch of ground where nobody congregates. It has been covered with fragrant dried grass, as a reserved seating area for the gods who will witness what is about to take place and, if all goes well, bless the people.
The people are singing. The horse is walking, led by a priest, and preceded by a goat, who is also decorated and adorned. The priest walks the horse around the enclosure three times, slowly. The goat reaches the stake first, where its throat is slit and it is cut into pieces, prepared for the fire. The horse starts, perhaps, at the sound of the goat’s bleating, but he is offered sweet grass and soothing words. Then it is his turn.
The priests sing the horse’s praises as he is led into position and fettered. They apologize to him for any pain he has suffered in his lifetime – if he was whipped by a master, if he was harassed by flies. Then they describe how they will cut him apart and why, singing,
“You do not really die through this, nor are you harmed. You go to the gods on paths pleasant to go on. . . . Let this racehorse bring us good cattle and good horses, male children and all-nourishing wealth . . . Let the horse with our offerings achieve sovereign power for us.” (Doniger 92)
The lead priest, the brahmin, steps forward and asks the horse’s forgiveness, the bronze knife bright in his hand.
I’m Rose Judson. Welcome to Books of All Time.
Books of All Time is a podcast that’s tackling classic literature in chronological order. This is episode seven: The Rig Veda, Part One – Breathed by Its Own Nature. As always, if you want to read the transcript of this episode or see the references I used to write it, you can visit our website, www.booksofalltime.co.uk. There’s a link in the show notes if you need it. Let’s begin.
The Rig Veda is an immense collection of 1,028 hymns and poems that form part of the foundation of the Hindu religion. It’s the oldest of the four Vedas, which are the earliest sacred writings that make up the very large corpus of Hindu scripture – we’ll be talking about another of these, the Upanishads, this coming autumn. Like all the other works we’ve covered so far on Books of All Time, it’s an accretion – multiple authors over multiple generations contributed to it. Unlike the other works we’ve covered so far, the Rig Veda has never been lost to history or indecipherable since its original compilation. People have been reading it, reciting it, and studying it continuously for more than three thousand years.
It’s also the oldest work we have in an Indo-European language, an immense family of languages (including English) that spans everything from Czech to Cornish; Bengali to Breton. Specifically, the Rig Veda is in an Indo-Aryan language: Vedic Sanskrit. Scholarly consensus gives an approximate date of 1400–1500 BCE for the oldest layers of the Rig Veda, and it was standardized around 1000 BCE into its current shape of 10 books, or mandalas, of hymns, each with different themes or dedicated to specific sages or tribes from its origin culture.
What was that origin culture? It’s difficult to say who precisely the people of the Rig Veda were. They were a pastoral people – concerned with herding sheep, goats, cows, and horses. They were nomadic, and they may have migrated into South Asia from the Eurasian Steppe – an area of central Europe that covers, in part, what is now Ukraine – via modern Iran. The origin and identity of the Vedic people is actually a live, and surprisingly politically fraught, question. The archaeological evidence for them is very limited, and while it’s possible to glean some facts about them from the text of the Rig Veda, nothing is settled. In an episode of his Tides of History podcast that dives into the archaeological record around Bronze Age India, writer Patrick Wyman says that:
“It seems pretty clear that there was a population movement of some kind that brought people with ancestry ultimately tracing back to the steppe cultures of the Southern Urals around 2000 [BCE]. But as it stands right now, the dynamics, causes, and sequence of that population movement are extremely hazy, to say the least.” (Wyman 2022)
We’ll go into the archaeology and the linguistics – and the related controversies – more in the next episode. For now, we’ll work with this: the Vedic people are ancestors of people who live in (or who can trace their roots back to) the Indian subcontinent today, especially those whose families originate in northern India, Pakistan, and parts of Afghanistan. We know from the names of rivers mentioned in the hymns that the territory of the people who composed the Rig Veda covered the northwestern corner of the Indian subcontinent – roughly the region now known as Punjab, a name which means “five rivers.”
So that’s where they were, essentially. What did they write about? All sorts of things, but almost always within the context of ritual worship of their gods. The hymns of the Rig Veda discuss birth, death, warfare, horse racing, poetic inspiration, grief, several different creation myths, monsters, gods, lighting sacrificial fires that will please the gods, and methods for creating a potent hallucinogenic drink they called Soma.
At least, the ones I’ve read discuss all those things. There is no way I was going to read, let alone distill down into a 45-minute podcast, the entirety of this massive, massive text for you. I’m an unusually fast reader, and I had a two-month head start here, but I have my limits. Plus, it’s hard to find a complete and reputable translation of the Rig Veda in English – at least one that can be purchased for less than £50. Instead, I’ve relied on the Penguin Classics edition, originally published in 1981. It’s an anthology of the Rig Veda that includes 108 hymns selected by the Indologist, Sanskrit scholar (and former New York City Ballet company member) Wendy Doniger. She compiled 108 hymns because that was a magically or ritualistically significant number to the Vedic people. 108 still has spiritual significance for many Hindus today – 108 is, among other things, the number of attendants of the god Shiva, the number of times one should recite a mantra, and so on.
I’ll mention that Doniger’s work is currently very controversial within India itself, for reasons that, again, I’ll go into next episode. But her Rig Veda translations are extremely accessible, organized into different themes like Death, Creation, Sacrifice, and Soma. In her introduction, she says:
“One need not read all of the Rig Veda to enjoy its beauty and wisdom, and since the text is itself an anthology of separate, individually complete hymns, a selection destroys no continuity of the original.” (Doniger 11)
In that spirit, this summary episode will present my anthology of that anthology. I’m going to talk about some of the most moving or interesting hymns from the Rig Veda, breaking them into five different themes: Creation, Agni (the fire god), Indra (the lightning god), Soma (which is a plant, a drink, and a god all at once), and Death.
So first: Creation. As I alluded to earlier, there’s no one creation myth in the Rig Veda. Instead, there are several hymns that present a version of creation, either as part of a mythical origin story – for example, there’s a hymn about the god Indra which credits the creation of heaven and earth to a battle he fought – or as its own riddle. The first hymn in Doniger’s collection, which I quoted in part at the top of the episode, is one of these. It’s known as the Nasadiya Sukta. It is one of the later hymns added to the Rig Veda, and it has provoked generations of analysis, questioning, and speculation. “It is meant to puzzle and challenge,” Doniger explains, “to raise unanswerable questions, to pile up paradoxes.” (Doniger 11)
Here’s another excerpt from it that caught my attention immediately:
“Darkness was hidden by darkness in the beginning, with no distinguishing sign, all this was water. The life force that was covered with emptiness; that one arose through the power of heat.” (Doniger 25)
Is this not remarkably similar to language in the first chapter of Genesis, in the Bible? Genesis chapter 1, verse 2: “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” It is as if somewhere deep in the human brain there is an understanding that we very likely came out of the ocean. But where Genesis directly attributes creation to God, the Nasadiya Sukta leaves the door open for any number of explanations. Here are the last two verses:
“Who really knows? Who here will proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen?
Whence this creation has arisen – perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not – the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows – or perhaps he does not know.” (Doniger 25-26)
Be comfortable not knowing the answers, in other words. It’s a creation hymn that has space for mystics, for agnostics, as well as for the faithful.
Another creation hymn does mention a specific god, revealing him in stages, almost as if he’s the answer to a riddle: he is the god of the golden embryo, a cosmic egg yolk; he owns the snowy mountains and the ocean; he holds the earth and the sky in place, rules two- and four-footed creatures. At last, he is named: Prajapati, Lord of Progeny. “Grant our desires,” the hymn concludes, “Let us be lords of riches.” (Doniger 28)
This again is a very human impulse: to have a god whose powers are so vast as to be near-incomprehensible, capable of shaping and animating everything from continental weather systems to the organelles of skin cells, but who is also biddable enough to grant you success in your cattle raid, provided you sing in a way that pleases him.
The final creation hymn I’ll look at is one that describes the ritual sacrifice of a giant called Purusa – Doniger calls him the “primeval male” (p. 29). In addition to being enormous (“he grows beyond everything through food” [p. 30]), Purusa is described as having thousands of heads, eyes, and feet. But the gods sacrifice him, collecting his melted fat after he is burned to create animals. They also divide him up to create people:
“When they divided the man, into how many parts did they apportion him? . . . His mouth became the Brahmin; his arms were made into the Warrior[s], his thighs the People, and from his feet the Servants were born.” (Doniger 31)
Here we have the origins of the four social classes, or castes, which would become a feature of Hindu culture. These started out as real hierarchical divisions, but ones that were relatively fluid, until the British took control of India in the mid-19th century and decided to assign specific legal rights by caste. I mention this because Sanjoy Chakravorty of Temple University argued in his 2019 book, “The Truth About Us: The Politics of Information from Manu to Modi”, that this misguided restructuring of Indian society by the colonial authorities – what he calls in a BBC News article “acts of convenience and simplification” – was based on a selective and biased reading of Sanskrit texts like the Rig Veda.
There’s a responsibility here, when it comes to accepted interpretations of these texts among Western scholars – particularly Anglophone ones – to recognize that we may be standing on the shoulders of some very biased giants. Again, that’s something we’ll discuss more in the next episode.
For now, back to the hymns. We’ve talked about gods creating the world through sacrifice. Now it’s time to talk gods of the sacrifice. One of the key gods involved in that process is Agni, the god of fire – his name is related to the later Latin word for fire, ignus, from which we in English get ignite. In addition to being a fire god, Agni is also a patron of the priests who light sacrificial fires, as well as the messenger or mediator between mortals and immortals: in the form of fire, he carries prayers from the people to the gods.
The very first hymn of the entire Rig Veda – mandala 1, hymn 1 – begins “I pray to Agni”.
“Agni carried the prayers of the ancient sages and those of the present, too,” this hymn states. “He will bring the gods here.” (Doniger 99)
Doniger, in her annotations, explains that “When Agni is pleased, the sacrifice has a “good fire,” and when the sacrificers have a good fire, the gods have a good fire . . . and thus become generous.” (p. 100)
In some of the hymns the poets get quite familiar with Agni, which makes sense when you consider how closely they would have lived to fire. They ask him to be kind to them, to think of them as family, as his brothers, or even his children. They repeatedly point out that no matter which god they’re ultimately sacrificing to, they’re sacrificing to him, too. “When we offer sacrifice to this god or that god, in the full line of order it is to you alone that the oblation is offered,” they argue. “Let us have a good fire and be beloved.” (Doniger 100)
Reading the hymns, it’s clear that the poets of the Rig Veda considered all fires to be extensions of Agni. They talk about the riddle of his existence – how he vanishes, or is lost and needs to be found, or is hiding and needs to be coaxed into helping people. Confusingly, he’s also referred to as the Child of the Waters, or as the life force inside plants. Doniger says in the notes for one of the hymns that Agni as the Child of Water is “the form of fire that appears as the lightning born of the clouds.” (p. 104) I suppose lightning often comes accompanied by rain, and that you need plants to feed a fire, so it makes some sense to imagine that Agni is hidden in these places, or springs forth from them.
Even with modern kiln-dried wood and firelighters, getting a fire started can be a trial, so you see where these myths of Agni hiding and vanishing might relate. Agni was so important to the ritual of sacrifice that the preoccupation with fire would naturally lead to a romanticization of his fickleness.
My favorite hymn about Agni, though, is the one that talks about him as the fire of inspiration. The Vedic people (or at least some of them) had poetic contests, and in hymn 9 from mandala 6, titled “Agni and the Young Poet”, a young man prays to Agni, asking for help with his composition skills so that he can become a better poet than his father. “I do not know how to stretch the thread, nor weave the cloth,” the poet says – nice metaphor, by the way – “[Agni] is the one who knows how to stretch the thread and weave the cloth; he will speak the right words.” (Doniger 116) Then he describes a good old case of writer’s block:
“My ears fly open, my eye opens, as does this light that is fixed in my heart. My mind flies up, straining into the distance: what shall I say? What shall I think?” (Doniger 116)
This is so very relatable to me as a writer: I, too, often feel my mind straining into the distance. Help me, Agni! I can’t offer you horses, but I make pretty good polenta, if that interests you.
Another god who features heavily in the Rig Veda is Indra. He’s a classic sky-god: he wields the thunderbolt, like his mythological descendants Zeus and Thor. That’s not where the similarities with Zeus and Thor end, however. You may know that in Greek mythology, Zeus was the son of the titan Cronos, a sort of proto-god with a cruel, paranoid outlook: he was convinced that his children would eventually rise up and overpower him, so he took to eating them as soon as they were born. Cronos’s wife, Rhea hid Zeus as soon as he was born and tricked Cronos into swallowing a stone instead. Sure enough, Zeus grew up and killed his father.
This story about Zeus was first recorded in writing around 700 BCE, in the poet Hesiod’s Theogony. The Indra myth in the Rig Veda pre-dates this by about 800 years. While we can’t be sure who came first in the oral tradition, Indra takes the prize in literature.
Anyway. Indra was also born to a murderous father-god, and his mother likewise concealed him. Once he came into his power, Indra overthrew his father and began his career as a divine hero, a warrior-god who rides a white horse through the sky. His origin hymn (mandala 4, hymn 18) marks him out as special from the start: he emerges from his mother’s side rather than through, er, the usual exit. Then his mother abandons him, for reasons that aren’t clear. The hymn says:
“Why has she pushed him away, whom she carried for a thousand months and many autumns? For there is no one his equal among those who are born and those who will be born.
“As if she thought he was flawed, his mother hid Indra, though he abounded in manly strength.” (Doniger 142)
This seems to allude to another practice I first heard of in the context of learning about Greek myths: the practice of exposing newborns with physical disabilities to the elements. Regardless of whether those things are connected, Indra lives: he is able to stand of his own power almost immediately, like a newborn horse. The poet goes on, comparing Indra and his mother to cows:
“The heifer gave birth to the firm, strong, unassailable bull, the stout Indra. The mother let her calf wander unlicked, to seek his own ways by himself.” (Doniger 142-3)
Indra’s precocious strength grows, and in another hymn about him we have the chronicle of his most famous deed: the slaying of a monster called Vritra. This hymn begins in fine epic style: “Let me now sing the heroic deeds of Indra,” (Doniger 149), and describes the serpentlike dragon Vritra lurking on a mountainside. His great bulk is either blocking or contains the water mortals need to live.
Indra drinks the extract of the Soma plant – about which more shortly – and, filled with its divine power, rides off on the back of a white elephant, thunderbolt in hand. Vritra gives him a fight – even seems to wound him – but winds up “shattered, his nose crushed.” (Doniger 150)
I do like that image of the dragon’s squashed snoot. Water gushes forth from Vritra’s wound, or possibly from the source of water he’d been sitting on, and seven rivers flow into the land, filling the oceans, stirring up rain to support the people and their animals. Immediately, however, Indra has to reckon with Vritra’s vengeful mother, Danu – shades of Beowulf, anyone, with the monster Grendel and his mother? (That is my theory what it is, which is mine. Must credit me if you use it.) Indra defeats Danu as well, and the hymn pathetically describes her as lying down in death next to the corpse of her son as the waters close over them forever.
It turns out that this is yet another parallel with Zeus, and possibly with Thor. The scholar Nicholas Kazanas compared the story of Indra and Vritra to the story of Zeus and the dragon Typhoeus as well as the story of Thor and the Midgard Serpent (Kazanas 18). All three feature similar protagonists and antagonists, and all three stories follow the same beats. The Rig Veda, again, offers us the earliest iteration of this mythological motif.
Indra also brings cows to the people, freeing them from caves where drought-demons have imprisoned them through the power of the hymns he chants. This act, along with his warlike nature, makes Indra the preferred deity to call on when preparing for a cattle raid. Hymn 14 of mandala 8, which Doniger titles “If I Were Like You, Indra” goes into detail about the benefits Indra can offer those who make pleasing sacrifices to him. “If I were like you, Indra,” the hymn begins:
“And all alone ruled over riches, the man who praised me would have the company of cows . . . there is no one, neither god nor mortal, who obstructs your generosity, Indra, when you are praised and you wish to give rich gifts.” (Doniger 159)
Such flattery. These poets offer metaphorical butter as well as actual butter. The final line of this hymn is telling, too: “you scattered to every side the ones that did not press Soma.” (160)
In other words, you defeated the people who were not like us. Soma-drinking to obtain a sacred trance state was not just an important ritual practice to the Vedic people; it was a marker of their identity. But what is Soma? Nobody is entirely sure.
We know that Soma was made from a plant, and that the stalks of the plant would be pressed between stones to get the juice out (there are hymns that describe, and romanticize, this process in minute detail). The juice would then be mixed with water or milk, and often honey, then strained through a woolen mesh before drinking. There are also many descriptions of the effects of Soma. It confers feelings of power – hence Indra drinking it before riding off to slay dragons – and a sense of immortality, as well as visions of the divine. (Doniger 119)
We also know that it’s not an alcohol-based drink. In a 2001 paper, “How a Psychoactive Substance Becomes a Ritual: The Case of Soma”, scholar Fritz Staal explains that the Rig Veda has hymns which differentiate between the intoxication of alcohol, which is harmful, and the intoxication of Soma, which is blissful or rapturous. (Staal 15)
What we don’t know is which plant was used to make it. Many scholars have had many ideas over the years, but right now, as far as I can tell, there seem to be two main candidates for the Soma plant. One theory is that Soma is one of the ephedra plants – ephedra has a strong stimulant effect; so strong, in fact, that it was banned as a dietary supplement in the U.S. in 2004 for causing sudden cardiac arrests.
Another theory put forward by the banker-turned-amateur-mycologist R. Gordon Wasson in 1971 states that Soma was actually the fly agaric mushroom, which is also a stimulant and a much more potent hallucinogen, known for making users feel invulnerable and aggressive. Wasson published a paper that goes minutely through the Rig Veda looking for descriptions of the soma plant and displays them next to photos of the fly agaric mushroom at various stages of its development to show similarities. He also notes, correctly, that the mushroom was used by Siberian shamans to induce trances until well into the 20th century.
If you made me choose, I’d go with the mushroom as the most likely candidate. Both these options, I think it goes without saying, are staggeringly toxic; please do not attempt any experiments at home, no matter how badly you need more cows.
There are hymns which tell about Indra bringing Soma down to the people for the first time with help from a giant eagle – a story that has shades of Prometheus stealing fire from the Greek gods, but without the grisly consequences of having his liver torn out forever.
Soma is also anthropomorphized by the Vedic poets as a god. He’s the watery counterpart to Agni’s fire – he, too, intercedes on behalf of humans with other gods. But he’s harder to handle even than the fickle Agni. “This restless Soma,” begins one hymn,
“You try to grab him, but he breaks away and overpowers everything . . . Be kind and merciful to us, Soma; be good to our heart, without confusing our powers in your whirlwind.” (Doniger 121)
By far my favorite hymn about Soma, though, is the one written from the perspective of a narrator who is actively very, very high. I’ll quote it at length here:
“This, yes, this is my thought: I will win a cow and a horse. Have I not drunk Soma?
Like impetuous winds, the drinks have lifted me up. Have I not drunk Soma?
The drinks have lifted me up, like swift horses bolting with a chariot. Have I not drunk Soma? . . .
In my vastness, I surpassed the sky and this vast earth. Have I not drunk Soma?
Yes! I will place the earth here, or perhaps there! Have I not drunk Soma? . . .
I am huge, huge! Flying to the cloud. Have I not drunk Soma?” (Doniger 131-2)
We’ve all been there, ancient sage, sometimes in front of our bosses or mothers-in-law. I don’t mean to make light of anyone’s scripture. It’s just that I get the sense that there is a rich vein of humor running through the Rig Veda – at least as it’s presented in this edition – and you can see it gleaming in the bedrock here. We are invited to smile at the narrator, who is imagining himself able to move the earth and fly as if he were one of the gods. We all know that every person, no matter how eloquent a poet or skilled a Soma-presser they are, must die. No god does that.
This brings me to the final hymns I want to discuss: the hymns about death. Just like there’s no consensus in the Rig Veda about how the world was created, there is also no consensus about what happens after death. Doniger notes that “these hymns reveal a world in which death is regarded with great sadness but without terror, and . . . heaven is regarded as a gentle place . . . a world of light and renewal.” (Doniger 41) This sounds so restful – so different to the bleak and lonely house of dust that awaited Enkidu and Gilgamesh, and certainly a welcome contrast to the supernatural courtroom drama described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
The hymns Doniger selected for her edition of the Rig Veda all center around ritual cremation, which was the primary (but not the only) funeral practice. They also all invoke Yama, King of the Dead. He was the first man to die, and the first to find his way to a heavenly pasture. He has two large dogs who sometimes act as grim reapers – striking the living down by sucking out their breath – and sometimes act as kindly guides, helping the dead find the path to Yama’s pasture. Obviously, a good sacrifice performed by the dead person’s mourners also makes a difference, and Yama is always invited to sit on the sacred grass reserved for the gods during a funeral.
Hymn 14 from mandala 10 also reveals another aspect of belief among (at least some of) the Vedic peoples: that a dead person could be joyfully reunited with ancestors in the afterlife.
“Go forth, go forth on these ancient paths on which our ancient fathers passed beyond. There you shall see the two kings, Yama and Varuna, rejoicing in the sacrificial drink.
Unite with the fathers, with Yama, with the rewards of your sacrifices and good deeds, in the highest heaven. Leaving behind all imperfections, go back home again, merge with a glorious body.” (Doniger 44)
Now that’s interesting, isn’t it? “Go back home again and merge with a glorious body.” Is that an early reference to the idea of reincarnation, which is important to both Hinduism and Buddhism? Not just yet, according to Doniger – transmigration or reincarnation are first described several centuries later, in the Upanishads. What the Rig Veda describes is a renewal of the deceased’s old body instead. (47)
There is a very confusing and slightly distressing hymn to be sung at a funeral fire. The lyric of the hymn begs Agni, the fire god, not to completely burn the corpse, but merely to “cook him perfectly.” (49) This isn’t because he’s to be eaten, obviously, but it isn’t clear to me what it really is about, even when I read Doniger’s notes:
“Agni cooks the corpse, a function regarded as the opposite of eating it (as he usually does); cooking raises it to a higher state (fit for heaven), while eating reduces it to a lower state (fit for animals).” (49)
It’s possible I’m just getting wrapped around the axel with the word “cook” here, or it’s possible that this is one of those things which just gets lost in translation. Either way, there is a fire, the deceased is laid upon it along with a sacrificial goat, and he is burned. “May your eye go to the sun,” the mourners say in this hymn, “your life’s breath to the wind. Go to the sky or to earth, as is your nature; or go to the waters, if that is your fate. Take root in the plants with your limbs.” (49)
There’s also a hymn specifically for burials – the Vedic people would bury some of their dead in mounds, as with many other cultures. This hymn is interesting to me for two reasons: first, it alludes to a belief that performing the funerary rites correctly will lengthen the lifespan of the mourners. Second, the eighth verse says this:
“Rise up, woman, into the world of the living. Come here; you are lying beside a man whose life’s breath has gone.” (52)
This seems to gesture at the very dark (and long outlawed, and never widely adopted) practice of suttee or sati, in which a widow will immolate herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, either by choice or by force. That’s not what’s happening, here – instead, it seems to be customary for the widow to demonstrate her profound grief by lying next to her husband for at least part of the funeral ceremony. And this hymn also closes with a very beautiful gesture toward the poet’s own mortality, which goes like this:
“On a day that will come, they will lay me in the earth, like the feather of an arrow. I hold back speech . . . as one would restrain a horse with a bridle.” (Doniger 53)
That’s the end of my summary of the Rig Veda. I hope you don’t mind me giving you an anthology of an anthology of a compilation of hymns, but part of this project is about piquing your interest in a topic. I will definitely return to the Rig Veda and try to find a decent, affordable full-length edition somewhere. Many of these hymns touch something right at the base of my skull, something that makes me feel awe the way a night sky does.
For themselves, the hymns of the Rig Veda speak to so many human experiences, and they have long threads which stretch through time and space to myths of other cultures we know well, and to the modern practices of a faith tradition that dominates what is now the world’s most populous country.
One thing I’ve been grappling with over the last three months, however, is the idea of authenticity or understanding. I’m aware that everything I’ve read so far (and everything I’m planning to read for the next several years) is a translation, and that the choices or limitations of the translators affect my relation to the text just as much as the antiquity of its origin culture does. It turns out that translators grapple with these issues, too, and have said lots of intelligent and thoughtful things about their craft over the years. We’ll talk more about the troubles with translation – and how translations can be received – in episode eight. That’s The Rig Veda, Part 2 – Painters, Not Photographers, which will be storming your beaches on Thursday, June 6.
Books of All Time is written and produced by me, Rose Judson. The Disclaimer Voice of Doom is Ed Brown. Lluvia Arras designed our cover art and logo. Special thanks to Yelena Shapiro, Cathy Merli, Matt Brough and the Books of All Time Advisory Council: Ed Brown, Beck Collins, Neil Dowling, Caitlin McMullin, Hugh Parker, and Jonathan “Focaccia” Skipp. You can support the show by subscribing and leaving a rating or review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and you can follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, or Facebook – we’re Books of All Time on every platform. Thanks for listening! I’ll be back in two weeks.
References and Works Cited:
Bhardwaj, Surinder M., and H.K. Manmohan Singh. “Punjab.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 9 May 2024, http://www.britannica.com/place/Punjab-state-India. Accessed 22 May 2024.
Chakravorty, Sanjoy. “Viewpoint: How the British Reshaped India’s Caste System.” BBC News, BBC, 19 June 2019, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-48619734. Accessed 22 May 2024.
Doniger, Wendy. The Rig Veda: An Anthology: One Hundred and Eight Hymns Selected, Translated and Annotated by Wendy Doniger. Penguin, 2005.
Doniger, Wendy. “Veda.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 26 Mar. 2024, http://www.britannica.com/topic/Veda. Accessed 22 May 2024.
Kazanas, Nicholas. “Archaic Greece and the Veda.” Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, vol. 82, no. 1/4, 2001, pp. 1–42, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41694629.
Staal, Frits. “How a Psychoactive Substance Becomes a Ritual: The Case of Soma.” Social Research, vol. 68, no. 3, 2001, pp. 745–778, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40971910.
Wasson, R. Gordon. “The Soma of the Rig Veda: What Was It?” Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 91, no. 2, 1971, pp. 169–187, doi:10.2307/600096.
Wyman, Patrick. “The Rigveda and the Dawn of the Iron Age in South Asia.” Tides of History, season 5, episode 63, Wondery, 22 Feb. 2024. https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/episode/5629-the-rigveda-and-the-dawn-of-the-iron-age-in-south-asia/
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