The Rigveda is one of the world’s most influential texts, since Indian culture has deep roots in it. It’s also one of the most dense and mysterious texts ever composed and a fascinating contrast with the West’s most influential ancient writings. So we’ll explore it here.
I’m using the word text loosely, since the Rigveda is a collection of oral verses that have been transmitted verbally and were put into writing about 2,000 years after most historians think they were composed. On the surface it’s a collection of 1028 hymns (called suktas, meaning well-spoken) that praise or pray to gods, which generations of families of priests memorized and recited.
The Rigveda’s priests conducted sacrifices for the prosperity of their society, which consisted of animal herders and some farmers who initially lived in Central Asia and performed rituals to burn offerings to gods in the sky. In the second millennium BCE they were moving into northwestern India, and their traditions began to converge with India’s natural landscape and local cultures.
However, this view was recently challenged. Some historians have said that the Rigveda was composed in India and that there was no Aryan migration into it. Shrikant G. Talageri has thought that the geographical and linguistic evidence in the hymns indicate migrations of Indo-Europeans westward from India instead.
But recent evidence from archaeology and genetics has confirmed that ancestors of Vedic society initially migrated from Central Asia and settled into India. David W. Anthony, in The Horse, the Wheel, and Language; How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, cited evidence from Russian archeologists that the ancestors of speakers of Sanskrit and all other Indo-European languages originated on the steppes north of the Black and Caspian seas by 3000 BCE. Most historians think Indo-European languages originated there, and that they then fanned out in various directions to become different families, including Indo-Iranian, Hellenic, Italic, Slavic, Celtic, and Germanic (which English later emerged from).
According to Anthony, the climate on the Eurasian steppes cooled and became more arid in the early third millennium BCE, and some societies protected themselves from the competition over scarcer resources by coalescing into fortified settlements. The Sintashta culture built walled communities east of the Urals on Russia’s northern steppes. One was a circular town about 500 feet in diameter, with earthen and timber-reinforced walls and wooden gate towers. Archeologists have found spoked-wheel chariots from around 2000 BCE at the site, along with details of funerary sacrifices and feasts which Anthony feels are strikingly similar to some of the Rigveda’s funerary rituals. They include horses that were ritually slaughtered and chariot burials.
Horses and spoked-wheel chariots, which weighed much less than chariots with solid wheels, made up the fastest vehicles humanity had yet created. Anthony wrote that elite groups of warriors who drove them could have quickly spread out, dominated locals, and established their religious practices as the most prestigious. The south, with warmer climates and precious minerals, lured some. By 1900 BCE, a related culture called the Petrovka established a metal-working colony by ore-producing sources down on the Zeravahan River, and they also drove chariots. To the west, a culture called BMAC (Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex) had built societies that focused more on farming, and many archaeologists feel that the chariot-driving and the more agricultural communities influenced each other. Groups of people soon migrated farther south through Pakistan and into India.
According to Tony Joseph, in Early Indians; The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From, recent research on ancient DNA has confirmed the archaeological evidence for Central Asian origins of much of the culture that composed the Rigveda. Articles in Science and Cell, which were both published on September 6, 2019, said that people with Steppe ancestry migrated into what are now Pakistan and India in the early second millennium BCE, and they still contribute 20% to 30% of the genetic ancestry of modern groups throughout India.
There have also been controversies over the Rigveda’s dates. Current scholarly consensus places them between 1700 BCE and 1000 BCE, while some of its admirers believe that parts of it are several centuries older. The latter cite astronomical observations that could only have occurred at a much earlier date than the mid-second century BCE. But attempts to push the Rigveda’s dates back that far must be reconciled with the Gathas as well as the recent scientific evidence. These are the earliest hymns in the Iranian Zoroastrian canon. Their language has a lot of commonalities with Vedic Sanskrit, and they have been dated to around 1500 BCE.
The recent evidence from archaeology and ancient DNA confirms the conclusion that the Rigveda was mainly composed by people with Steppe ancestry as they were migrating from Central Asia and settling into India. It thus reflects the experiences of a society dominated by male chariot-driving warriors and a religion oriented to sky gods as it assimilated India’s bountiful natural environment and local religious traditions that focused on the earth’s fertility. Appreciations of the vast sky over large open areas in Central Asia and India’s abundant natural ecosystems converged so that people became oriented to copious flows of energy that are not hemmed in by the proportions and human-scale spaces that ancient Greeks more often focused on.
One of the reasons for the wide dating and geographic discrepancies in ideas of the Rigveda’s origins is the density of its Sanskrit. The meanings of many words in the Rigveda’s hymns are too abundant to be confined to one class of objects. Aurobindo wrote that words in them were originally energies full of undefined potential, which only later condensed into fixed signs and symbols with precise meanings. Several ancient Indian linguists wrote that this multitude of meanings of single words was common in the Rigveda; they held different assumptions about language than what Westerners have usually maintained. Instead of focusing on descriptions and stories of visible and distinct objects and people (as the Homeric poems do), language emanated from a more primary seed of energy called bija, which later differentiated into the things people conventionally see in the world. Different assumptions about the most basic nature of language and meaning emerged in India and Greece.
Many of the high flying philosophies in the Upanishads, and many of the epic visions in the Mahabharata and Ramayana emerged from this older text’s expressions of a vast and integrated space-time field.
Here are some basic facts about the Rigveda.
The Rigveda is structured into 10 books, called mandalas. Mandalas II-VII are the oldest, and each is attributed to a different family of rishis, or sages.
The Rigveda is considered to be sruti, which is a subtle type of hearing. It’s often distinguished from smrti, which is what’s remembered. Sruti comes from the deepest truths in the universe, and a rishi perceives it directly. It’s perceived as subtle vibrations that ordinary folks cannot apprehend.
The Rigveda’s hymns were recited and chanted at sacrifices under the open sky, in temporary structures made of perishable materials, and in homes, and people performed lots of them. They gave gifts of food and drink to gods who descended and rested on sacred grass which worshipers had piled on the ground. Three fires often burned around the grass, to the west, south, and east. The western fire represented the world that humans lived in, the southern fire represented dangerous powers that needed be controlled, and the eastern fire represented the heavens. Priests poured the main sacrifices over the eastern one. People thereby used the fires to create a microcosm of the universe and believed that its energies empowered their rituals.
Many sacrifices were regularly conducted. People performed the agnihotra every morning and evening, offering milk to the gods. There were new and full moon sacrifices, and offerings at the beginning of spring, the monsoon, and autumn. Animal sacrifices were also common, and the horse sacrifice was one of the most elaborate. It honored the tribal leader before states emerged and the king after they did. Not surprisingly, this was a dramatic shindig with intricate procedures. The Khmers who built Angkor Wat would have loved it.
Most of the Rigveda’s hymns are associated with soma sacrifices. People extracted this plant’s juice by pounding or pressing it with stones. It was then mixed with water and often milk. Priests who drank it sang about becoming greater than heaven and earth and being able to drive the sun. Book Nine of the Rigveda is devoted to it. More than 100 theories have been proposed about what the plant was, but its ability to evoke cosmic visions and inspire feelings of ubiquitous power sounds like it could have held its own at a 1967 Grateful Dead concert.
Some Westerners have criticized the Rigveda for lacking deep thought. It’s full of prayers to gods for longevity, sons, cows, rain, and victory in battle, and priests seem to have gotten higher than a U-2 at times—hardly ennobling stuff. But M. Sundarraj, in Rg Vedic Studies, wrote that most Western writers miss its refinement. For example, he said that it has many words for light, and that jyoti was often used for a particularly subtle light. Ordinary people cannot see it with their eyes, but it was a basic aspect of the universe at creation, and it still pervades it. Sundarraj said that Vritra was identified with darkness, so Indra’s battle against him to enable the annual rains to come has a metaphysical meaning of primeval light overcoming darkness. Reciting or chanting the Rigveda brought priests’ consciousness back to the origin of the universe and to the continued presence of its powers. It has many other terms for widely pervasive light, including prakasha, praketa, sveta, ruc, bhanu, and svar.
The Rigveda has many other words that express subtleties in nature which the ordinary five senses can’t perceive. Vayu and vata are winds that ripple through the universe and carry its energies. Joel Brereton and Stephanie Jamison, in The Rigveda; A Guide, noted a wealth of other terms which often referred to gods’ power, including ojas, mahas, sahas, and savas. They noted that the English language doesn’t convey their wealth of meanings, which include not only strength and greatness, but also mental and spiritual qualities such as will, capability, and dominance. This large range of terms for pervasive energies enables Vedic verses to express cosmic vastness in a limitless variety of ways.
Vedic society didn’t build temples. Rites were outdoors, where the offerings could be burned and transformed to smoke that would reach the gods. Egyptians, Greeks and Mesopotamians created monumental temples, and they were central in their cities. Ancient Indians could set up sacrificial grounds anywhere. Any place could be made sacred, and religion wasn’t bound to specific places. Heinrich Zimmer noted that Vedic Indians didn’t focus on circumscribed locations to make pilgrimages to, where they could feel the gods’ heightened presence. Priests summoned deities in many places by piling sacred grass and building altars with bricks. Stella Kramrisch wrote that these altars were infused with magical power. They were mathematically complex in ways that harmonized them with the universe. For example, numbers of bricks were correlated with cycles of time. People could thereby create microcosms of nature anywhere they wanted to. Indians began to build large temples in the early first millennium CE.
People in Vedic society didn’t make statues–at least we don’t have evidence that they did. This is another dramatic contrast with Egypt, Greece and Mesopotamia. The latter three liked to visualize their gods in human forms and set them up in places that resembled great houses (Pharaoh comes from per aa, great house). Mimesis (the imitation of what we see in the world as the basis of art and language) has been central in the West. But Vedic religion was portable and its locus of operation ranged far beyond any temple or image in human forms. It was less concerned with mimesis and more with efficacy–it’s verses are more focused on channeling the universe’s energies to benefit the people conducting rituals than on describing things.
Indra and the Maruts were the Rigveda’s most frequently visualized gods, but the verses don’t go into nitty-gritty details about them. The portrayals are idealized instead. Short passages describe Indra as radiant in arms, breastplates, garlands, ornaments, and chariots. His depictions are much briefer than the Iliad’s portrayal of the shield that Achilles used in his fight with Hector. When imagery is used in the Rigveda, it’s in ritualized verses that praise attributes of gods. The Maruts are honored in a similar way. They’re acclaimed for their ornaments, gleaming golden helmets, and glinting spears of lightning. The Rigveda is not nearly as concerned with what the ordinary person sees in daily life. Instead its images are often hyperbolic and embellished in order to dramatize connections between gods and cosmic energies. This tendency to use visualization to idealize and empower gods as they’re praised rather than describe all their visual details has remained dominant in Indian religious art throughout its history.
India and the West developed some of their most recognizable thought in remote antiquity. The earliest literature from both lands expressed perspectives of the world that were already highly developed and which still persist. Greeks became oriented to proportion, distinct entities, linear relationships, and visual details. Indians more often appreciated vastness, abundant energies, pervasiveness throughout the universe, and sonic vibrations. What seems basic converged in the whole cultural environment. Common patterns formed in it which have characterized people’s experiences. What’s assumed to be fundamental reflects this entire environment.