CHAPTER 5

HUMANS, ANIMALS, AND GODS IN THE RIG VEDA
1500 to 1000 BCE

CHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES BCE)

c. 1700-1500 Nomads in the Punjab region compose the Rig Veda

c. 1200-900 The Vedic people compose the Yajur Veda, Sama Veda, and Atharva Veda

DIVERSE CALLINGS

Our thoughts bring us to diverse callings, setting people apart:
the carpenter seeks what is broken,
the physician a fracture,
and the Brahmin priest seeks someone who presses soma.

I am a poet; my dad’s a physician
and Mom a miller with grinding stones.
With diverse thoughts we all strive for wealth,
going after it like cattle.

Rig Veda (9.112) (c. 1500 BCE)

In this chapter we will encounter the people who lived in the Punjab in about 1500 BCE and composed the texts called the Vedas. We will face the violence embedded in the Vedic sacrifice of cattle and horses and situate that ritual violence in the social violence that it expresses, supports, and requires, the theft of other people’s cattle and horses. We will then consider the social world of the Vedas, focusing first on the tension between the Brahmin and royal/martial classes (the first and second classes) and the special position of the fourth and lowest class, the servants; then on other marginalized people; and finally on women. Marginalization also characterizes people of all classes who fall prey to addiction and/or intoxication, though intoxication from the soma plant (pressed to yield juice) is the privilege of the highest gods and Brahmins.

Turning from the people to their gods, we will begin with the pluralism and multiplicity of the Vedic pantheon and the open-mindedness of its ideas about creation. Then we will consider divine paradigms for human priests and kings, the Brahminical god Agni (god of fire) and the royal gods Varuna (god of the waters) and Indra (the king of the gods). We will conclude with ideas about death and reincarnation that, on the one hand, show the same pluralistic range and speculative open-mindedness as the myths of creation and, on the other hand, set the scene for a major social tension among Hindus in centuries to come.

THE TRANSMISSION OF THE RIG VEDA

We have just considered at some length the question of the prehistory of the people who composed the Rig Veda, people who, sometime around 1500 BCE, in any case probably not earlier than the second millennium BCE,¹ were moving about in what is now the Punjab, in Northwestern India and Pakistan. They lived in the area of the Seven Rivers (Sapta Sindhu), the five tributaries of the Indus plus the Indus itself and the Sarasvati. We can see the remains of the world that the people of the Indus Valley built, but we are blind to the material world of the Vedic people; the screen goes almost blank. The Vedic people left no cities, no temples, scant physical remains of any kind; they had to borrow the word for “mortar.”² They built nothing but the flat, square mud altars for the Vedic sacrifice³ and houses with wooden frames and walls of reed stuffed with straw and, later, mud. Bamboo ribs supported a thatched roof. None of this of course survived.

But now at last our sound reception is loud and, for the most part, clear. Those nomads in the Punjab composed poems in an ancient form of Sanskrit; the oldest collection is called the Rig Veda (“Knowledge of Verses”). We can hear, and often understand, the words of the Vedas, even though words spoken so long ago are merely clues, not proofs, and interpretation, with all its biases, still raises its ugly head at every turn. The social and material world is vividly present in Vedic texts. What sort of texts are they?

The Rig Veda consists of 1,028 poems, often called mantras (“incantations”), grouped into ten “circles” (“mandalas”). (It is generally agreed that the first and last books are later additions, subsequent bookends around books 2-9.) The verses were rearranged for chanting as the Sama Veda(“Knowledge of Songs”) and, with additional prose passages, for ritual use as the Yajur Veda (“Knowledge of Sacrifice”); together they are known as the three Vedas. A fourth, the Atharva Veda (“Knowledge of the Fire Priest”), devoted primarily to practical, worldly matters, and spells to deal with them, was composed later, sharing some poems with the latest parts of the Rig Veda.

The Rig Veda was preserved orally even when the Indians had used writing for centuries, for everyday things like laundry lists and love letters and gambling IOUs.⁴ But they refused to preserve the Rig Veda in writing.^bb All Vedic rituals were accompanied by chants from the Sama Veda, which the priests memorized. The Mahabharata (13.24.70) groups people who read and recite the Veda from a written text (rather than memorize it and keep it only in their heads) with corrupters and sellers of the Veda as people heading for hell. A Vedic text states that “a pupil should not recite the Veda after he has eaten meat, seen blood or a dead body, had sexual intercourse, or engaged in writing.”⁵ It was a powerful text, whose power must not fall into the wrong hands. Unbelievers and infidels, as well as Pariahs and women, were forbidden to learn the Vedas, because they might defile or injure the power of the words,⁶ pollute it like milk kept in a bag made of dogskin.

The oral text of the Rig Veda was therefore memorized in such a way that no physical traces of it could be found, much as a coded espionage message would be memorized and then destroyed (eaten, perhaps—orally destroyed) before it could fall into the hands of the enemy. Its exclusively oral preservation ensured that the Rig Veda could not be misused even in the right hands: you couldn’t take the Rig Veda down off the shelf in a library, for you had to read it in the company of a wise teacher or guru, who would make sure that you understood its application in your life. Thus the Veda was usually passed down from father to son, and the lineages of the schools or “branches” (shakhas) that passed down commentaries “from one to another” (param-para) were often also family lineages, patriarchal lineages (gotras). Those who taught and learned the Rig Veda were therefore invariably male Brahmins in this early period, though later other classes too may have supplied teachers, and from the start those who composed the poems may well have been more miscellaneous, even perhaps including some women, to whom some poems are attributed.

The oral nature of the Rig Veda (and of the other Vedas too) was expressed in its name; it was called shruti (“what is heard”), both because it was originally “heard” (shruta) by the human seers to whom the gods dictated it but also because it continued to be transmitted not by being read or seen but by being heard by the worshipers when the priests chanted it.⁷ The oral metaphor is not the only one—ancient sages also “saw” the Vedic verses—but it does reflect the dominant mode of transmission, orality. It made no more sense to “read” the Veda than it would simply to read the score of a Brahms symphony and never hear it.

Now, one might suppose that a text preserved orally in this way would be subject to steadily encroaching inaccuracy and unreliability, that the message would become increasingly garbled like the message in a game of telephone, but one would be wrong. For the very same sacredness that made it necessary to preserve the Rig Veda orally rather than in writing also demanded that it be preserved with meticulous accuracy. People regarded the Rig Veda as a revealed text, and one does not play fast and loose with revelation. It was memorized in a number of mutually reinforcing ways, including matching physical movements (such as nodding the head) with particular sounds and chanting in a group, which does much to obviate individual slippage. According to the myth preserved in the tradition of European Indology, when Friedrich Max Müller finally edited and published the Rig Veda at the end of the nineteenth century, he asked a Brahmin in Calcutta to recite it for him in Sanskrit, and a Brahmin in Madras, and a Brahmin in Bombay (each spoke a different vernacular language), and each of them said every syllable of the entire text exactly as the other two said it. In fact this academic myth flies in the face of all the available evidence; Müller produced his edition from manuscripts, not from oral recitation. (It is of these manuscripts that Müller remarks, “The MSS. of the Rig-veda have generally been written and corrected by the Brahmans with so much care that there are no various readings in the proper sense of the word.”⁸) Yet like many myths, it does reflect a truth: People preserved the Rig Veda intact orally long before they preserved it intact in manuscript, but eventually it was consigned to writing (as were the originally oral poems the Mahabharata and the Ramayana).

Sanskrit, the language of authority, was taken up by the various people in India who spoke other languages. At the same time, Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic languages (such as the Munda languages) began to enter Vedic Sanskrit. As usual, the linguistic traditions invented one another; Sanskrit influenced Tamil, and Tamil influenced Sanskrit. The Vedic tradition shows its awareness that different groups spoke different languages when it states that the four priests in the horse sacrifice address the horse with four different names, for when it carries men, they call it ashva (“horse”); when it carries Gandharvas,^bc they call it vajin (“spirited horse”); for antigods, arvan (“swift horse”); and for gods haya (“racehorse”).⁹ Presumably they expect each of these groups to have its own language,¹⁰ which is evidence of a consciousness of multilingualism¹¹ or multiple dialects.

THE VIOLENCE OF SACRIFICE

Theirs was a “portable religion,”¹² one that they carried in their saddlebags and in their heads. As far as we can reconstruct their rituals from what is, after all, a hymnal, they made offerings to various gods (whom we shall soon encounter below) by throwing various substances, primarily butter, into a fire that flared up dramatically in response. The Vedic ritual of sacrifice (yajna) joined at the hip the visible world of humans and the invisible world of gods. The sacrifice established bonds (bandhus), homologies between the human world (particularly the components of the ritual) and corresponding parts of the universe. Ritual was thought to have effects on the visible and invisible worlds because of such connections, meta-metaphors that visualize many substances as two things at once—not just a rabbit and a man in the moon, but your eye and the sun.

All the poems of the Rig Veda are ritual hymns in some sense, since all were sung as part of the Vedic ceremony, but only some are self-consciously devoted to the meaning of the ritual. The verses served as mantras (words with powers to affect reality) to be pronounced during rituals of various sorts: solemn or semipublic rituals (royal consecrations and sacrifices of the soma plant), life cycle rituals (marriage, funeral, and even such tiny concerns as a baby’s first tooth),¹³ healing rituals, and both black and white magic spells (such as the ones we will soon see, against rival wives and for healthy embryos). Yet even here pride of place is given to the verbal rather than to the physical aspect of the sacrifice, to poems about the origins and powers of sacred speech (10.71, 10.125). The personal concerns of the priests also inspire considerable interest in the authors of the poems (most of whom were priests themselves): The priest whose patron is the king laments the loss of his royal friend and praises faith and generosity, while other priests, whose tenure is more secure, express their happiness and gratitude (10.33, 101, 117, 133, 141).

Although detailed instructions on the performance of the rituals were spelled out only in the later texts,^bd the Rig Veda presupposes the existence of some protoversion of those texts. There were animal sacrifices (such as the horse sacrifice) and simple offerings of oblations of butter into the consecrated fire. The more violent sacrifices have been seen as a kind of “controlled catastrophe,” ¹⁴ on the “quit before you’re fired” principle or, more positively, as life insurance, giving the gods what they need to live (soma, animal sacrifices, etc.) in order that they will give us what we need to live.

FAST-FORWARD: THE THREE ALLIANCES

At this point, it might be useful to pause and group ideas about the relationships between humans and gods (and antigods) in the history of Hinduism into three alliances. The three units are not chronological periods but attitudes that can be found, to a greater or lesser degree, across the centuries. It would be foolhardy to tie them to specific times, because attitudes in Hinduism tend to persist from one period to another, simply added on to new ideas that one might have expected to replace them, and archaic ideas are often intentionally resurrected in order to lend an air of tradition to a later text. Nevertheless such a typology has its uses, for each of the three alliances does begin, at least, at a moment that we can date at least relative to the other alliances, and each of them dominates the texts of one of three consecutive periods.

In the first alliance, which might be called Vedic, gods and antigods (Asuras) are opposed to each other, and gods unite with humans against both the antigods, who live in the sky with the gods, and the ogres (Rakshases or Rakshasas), lower-class demons that harass humans rather than gods. The antigods are the older brothers of the gods, the “dark, olden gods” in contrast with “the mortal gods of heaven,”¹⁵ like the Titans of Greek mythology; the Veda still calls the oldest Vedic gods—Agni, Varuna--Asuras. The gods and antigods have the same moral substance (indeed the gods often lie and cheat far more than the antigods do; power corrupts, and divine power corrupts divinely); the antigods are simply the other team. Because the players on each side are intrinsically differentiated by their morals, the morals shift back and forth from one category to another during the course of history, and even from one text to another in any single period: As there are good humans and evil humans, so there are good gods and evil gods, good antigods and evil antigods. In the absence of ethical character, what the gods and antigods have is power, which they can exercise at their pleasure. The gods and antigods are in competition for the goods of the sacrifice, and since humans sacrifice to the gods, they are against the antigods, who always, obligingly, lose to the gods in the end. It is therefore important for humans to keep the gods on their side and well disposed toward them. Moreover, since the gods live on sacrificial offerings provided by devout humans, the gods wish humans to be virtuous, for then they will continue to offer sacrifices.

The Vedic gods were light eaters; they consumed only a polite taste of the butter, or the animal offerings, or the expressed juice of the soma plant, and the humans got to eat the leftovers. What was fed to the fire was fed to the gods; in later mythology, when Agni, the god of fire, was impregnated by swallowing semen instead of butter, all the gods became pregnant.¹⁶ Not only did the gods live upon the sacrificial foods, but the energy generated in the sacrifice kept the universe going. The offerings that the priest made into the fire kept the fire in the sun from going out; if no one sacrificed, the sun would not rise each morning. Moreover, the heat (tapas) that the priest generated in the sacrifice was a powerful weapon for gods or humans to use against their enemies. Heat is life, in contrast with the coldness of death, and indeed Hindus believe that there is a fire in the belly (called the fire that belongs to all men) that digests all the food you eat, by cooking it (again). When those fires go out, it’s all over physically for the person in question, as it is ritually if the sacrificial fires go out; you must keep the sacrificial fire in your house burning and carefully preserve an ember to carry to the new house if you move.

But since antigods had no (legitimate) access to sacrificial tapas, the best that they (and the ogres) could do in their Sisyphean attempt to conquer the gods was to interfere with the sacrifice (the antigods in heaven and the ogres on earth) in order to weaken the gods. Though humans served as mere pawns in these cosmic battles, it was in their interest to serve the gods, for the antigods and ogres would try to kill humans (in order to divert the sacrifice from the gods), while the gods, dependent on sacrificial offerings, protected the humans. In the Upanishads, the gods and antigods are still equal enemies, though the antigods make an error in metaphysical judgment that costs them dearly.¹⁷ Throughout the history of Hinduism, beginning in the Vedas, the antigods and ogres often serve as metaphors for marginalized human groups, first the enemies of the Vedic people, then people excluded from the groups that the Brahmins allowed to offer sacrifice. This first Vedic alliance is still a major force in Indian storytelling today, but it was superseded, in some, though not all, ways, by two more alliances.

To fast-forward for just a moment, the second alliance begins in the Mahabharata and continues through the Puranas (medieval compendiums of myth and history). In this period, the straightforward Vedic alignment of forces—humans and gods versus antigods and ogres—changed radically, as sacrificial power came to be supplemented and sometimes replaced by ascetic and meditative power. Now uppity antigods and ogres, who offer sacrifices when they have no right to do so or ignore the sacrificial system entirely and generate internal heat (tapas) all by themselves, are grouped with uppity mortals, who similarly threaten the gods not with their acts of impiety but, on the contrary, with their excessive piety and must be put back in their place. Often the threatening religious power comes from individual renunciants, a threat to the livelihood of the Vedic ecclesia and an open door to undesirable (i.e., non-Brahmin) types, a kind of wildcat religion or pirated religious power. For like the dangerous submarine mare fire, these individual ascetics generate tapas like power from a nuclear reactor or heat in a pressure cooker; they stop dissipating their heat by ceasing to indulge in talking, sex, anger, and so forth; they shut the openings, but the body goes on making heat, which builds up and can all too easily explode. (Later Tantra goes one step further and encourages adepts to increase the heat by generating as well as harnessing unspent desire.)

Old-fashioned sacrifice too now inspires jealousy in the gods, who are, paradoxically, also sacrificers. Indra, who prides himself on having performed a hundred horse sacrifices, frequently steals the stallion of kings who are about to beat his record. (We have seen him do this to King Sagara, resulting in the creation of the ocean.) The result is that now it is the gods, not the antigods, who wish humans to be diminished by evil. The idea that to be too good may be to tempt fate, threaten the gods, or invite the evil eye is widespread, well known from Greek tragedies, which called this sort of presumption hubris (related in concept, though not etymology, to the Yiddish hutzpah). The second alliance is full of humans, ogres, and antigods that are too good for their own good.

The balance of power changed again when, in the third alliance, devotion (bhakti) entered the field, repositioning the Vedic concept of human dependence on the gods so that the gods protected both devoted men and devoted antigods. This third alliance is in many ways the dominant structure of local temple myths even today. But that is getting far ahead of our story.

CATTLE AND HORSES: INDIANS AS COWBOYS

What the Vedic people asked for most often in the prayers that accompanied sacrifice was life, health, victory in battle, and material prosperity, primarily in the form of horses and cows. This sacrificial contract powered Hindu prayers for many centuries, but the relationship with horses and cows changed dramatically even in this early period.

As nomadic tribes, the Vedic people sought fresh pastureland for their cattle and horses.^be As pastoralists and, later, agriculturalists, herders and farmers, they lived in rural communities. Like most of the Indo-Europeans, the Vedic people were cattle herders and cattle rustlers who went about stealing other people’s cows and pretending to be taking them back. One story goes that the Panis, tribal people who were the enemies of the Vedic people, had stolen cows from certain Vedic sages and hidden them in mountain caves. The gods sent the bitch Sarama to follow the trail of the cows; she found the hiding place, bandied words with the Panis, resisted their attempts first to threaten her and then to bribe her, and brought home the cows (10.108).

The Vedic people, in this habit (as well as in their fondness for gambling), resembled the cowboys of the nineteenth-century American West, riding over other people’s land and stealing their cattle. The resulting political agendas also present rough parallels (in both senses of the word “rough”): Compare, on the one hand, the scornful attitude of these ancient Indian cowboys (an oxymoron in Hollywood but not in India) toward the “barbarians” (Dasyus or Dasas) whose lands they rode over (adding insult to injury by calling them cattle thieves) and, some four thousand years later, the American cowboys’ treatment of the people whom they called, with what now seems cruel irony, Indians, such as the Navajo and the Apache. So much for progress. Unlike the American cowboys, however, the Vedic cowboys did not yet (though they would, by the sixth century BCE) have a policy of owning and occupying the land, for the Vedic people did not build or settle down; they moved on. They did have, however, a policy of riding over other people’s land and of keeping the cattle that they stole from those people. That the word gavisthi (“searching for cows”) came to mean “fighting” says it all.

The Vedic people sacrificed cattle to the gods and ate cattle themselves, and they counted their wealth in cattle. They definitely ate the beef of steers¹⁸ (the castrated bulls), both ritually and for many of the same reasons that people nowadays eat Big Macs (though in India, Big Macs are now made of mutton); they sacrificed the bulls^bf (Indra eats the flesh of twenty bulls or a hundred buffalo and drinks whole lakes of soma¹⁹) and kept most of the cows for milk. One verse states that cows were “not to be killed” (a-ghnya[7.87.4]), but another says that a cow should be slaughtered on the occasion of marriage (10.85.13), and another lists among animals to be sacrificed a cow that has been bred but has not calved (10.91.14),²⁰ while still others seem to include cows among animals whose meat was offered to the gods and then consumed by the people at the sacrifice. The usual meal of milk, ghee (clarified butter), vegetables, fruit, wheat, and barley would be supplemented by the flesh of cattle, goats, and sheep on special occasions, washed down with sura (wine) or madhu (a kind of mead).

There is a Vedic story that explains how it is that some people stopped killing cows and began just to drink their milk.^bg The Rig Veda only alludes to this story, referring to a king named Prithu, who forced the speckled cow who is the earth to let her white udder yield soma as milk for the gods.²¹ But later texts spell it out:

KING PRITHU MILKS THE EARTH

There was a king named Vena who was so wicked that the sages killed him; since he left no offspring, the sages churned his right thigh, from which was born a deformed little man, dark as a burned pillar, who was the ancestor of the Nishadas and the barbarians. Then they churned Vena’s right hand, and from him Prithu was born. There was a famine, because the earth was withholding all of her food. King Prithu took up his bow and arrow and pursued the earth to force her to yield nourishment for his people. The earth assumed the form of a cow and begged him to spare her life; she then allowed him to milk her for all that the people needed. Thus did righteous kingship arise on earth among kings of the lunar dynasty, who are the descendants of Prithu.²²

This myth, foundational for the dynasty that traces its lineage back to Prithu, is cited in many variants over thousands of years. It imagines a transition from hunting wild cattle (the earth cow) to preserving their lives, domesticating them, and breeding them for milk, in a transition to agriculture and pastoral life. The myth of the earth cow, later the wishing cow (kama-dhenu), from whom you can milk anything you desire—not just food but silk cloths, armies of soldiers, anything—is the Hindu parallel to the Roman cornucopia (or the German Tischlein dech dich, the table that sets itself with a full table d’hôte dinner on command). Cows are clearly of central economic, ritual, and symbolic importance in the Vedic world.

But the horse, rather than the cow, was the animal whose ritual importance and intimacy with humans kept it from being regarded as food,²³ though not from being killed in sacrifices. Horses were essential not only to drawing swift battle chariots but to herding cattle, always easier to do from horseback in places where the grazing grounds are extensive.²⁴ And extensive is precisely what they were; the fast track of Vedic life was driven by the profligate grazing habits of horses, who force their owners to move around looking for new grazing land all the time. Unlike cows, horses pull up the roots of the grass or eat it right down to the ground so that it doesn’t grow back, thus quickly destroying grazing land, which may require some years to recover; moreover, horses do not like to eat the grass that grows up around their own droppings.²⁵ The horse in nature is therefore constantly in search of what the Nazis (also justifying imperialistic aggression) called Lebensraum (“living space”). It is not merely, as is often argued, that the horse made possible conquest in war, through the chariot; the stallion came to symbolize conquest in war, through his own natural imperialism. And the ancient Indian horse owners mimicked this trait in their horses, at first showing no evidence of any desire to amass property, just a drive to move on, always to move on, to new lands. For the Vedic people probably did then what Central Asians did later: They let the animals roam freely as a herd.²⁶ But once they began to fence in their horses and kept them from their natural free grazing habits, the need to acquire and enclose new grazing lands became intense, especially when, in the early Vedic period, there was no fodder crop.²⁷

THE WIDE-OPEN SPACES

All this land grabbing was supported by a religion whose earliest texts urge constant expansion. The name of the king who hunted the earth cow, Prithu, means “broad,” and the feminine form of the word, Prithivi, is a word for the whole, broad earth, the natural consort of the king. Prithu had the connotation of something very much like “the wide-open spaces.” The opposite of the word prithu is the word for a tight spot, in both the physical and the psychological sense; that word is amhas, signifying a kind of claustrophobia, the uneasiness of being constrained in a small space. (Amhas is cognate with our word “anxiety” and the German Angst.) In this context, amhas might well be translated “Don’t fence me in,” since it occurs in a number of Vedic poems in which the poet imagines himself trapped in a deep well or a cave, from which he prays to the gods to extricate him. (Sometimes it is the cows who are trapped in the cave, or the waters, or the sun.) Many of the poems take this form; the poet thanks the god for his help in the past (“Remember the time I was in that tight spot, and you got me out?”), reminds him of his gratitude (“And didn’t I offer you great vats of soma after that?”), flatters him (“No one but you can do this; you are the greatest”), and asks for a return engagement (“Well, I’m in even worse trouble now; come and help me, I beg you”).

Appropriately, it is often the Ashvins who rescue people from such tight spots and bring them back into the good, broad places. For the Ashvins (whose name means “equine”) are twin horse-headed gods, animal herders, sons of the divine mare Saranyu (10.17.1-2). The other Vedic gods generally snub the Ashvins, in part because they are physicians (a low trade in ancient India, involving as it does polluting contacts with human bodies) and in part because they persist in slumming, helping out mortals in trouble. The gods denied them access to the ambrosial soma drink until one mortal (a priest named Dadhyanch), for whom the Ashvins had done a favor, reciprocated by whispering to them, through a horse’s head he had put on for that occasion to speak to their horse heads, the secret of the soma—literally from the horse’s mouth (1.116.12, 1.117.22, 1.84.13-15). Later texts explain that Dadhyanch knew that Indra, the jealous king of the gods, would punish him for this betrayal by cutting off his head, so he laid aside his own head, used a talking horse head to tell the secret, let Indra cut off the horse head, and then put his own back on.²⁸

THE HORSE SACRIFICE

Embedded in the tale of Dadhyanch and the Ashvins is the ritual beheading of a horse. One of the few great public ceremonies alluded to in the Vedas is the sacrifice of a horse, by suffocation rather than beheading but followed by dismemberment. There are epigraphical records of (as well as literary satires on) horse sacrifices throughout Indian history. One Vedic poem^bh describes the horse sacrifice in strikingly concrete, indeed rather gruesome detail, beginning with the ceremonial procession of the horse accompanied by a dappled goat, who was killed with the horse but offered to a different, less important god:

DISMEMBERING THE HORSE

Whatever of the horse’s flesh the fly has eaten, or whatever stays stuck to the stake or the ax, or to the hands or nails of the slaughterer—let all of that stay with you even among the gods. Whatever food remains in his stomach, sending forth gas, or whatever smell there is from his raw flesh—let the slaughterers make that well done; let them cook the sacrificial animal until he is perfectly cooked. Whatever runs off your body when it has been placed on the spit and roasted by the fire, let it not lie there in the earth or on the grass, but let it be given to the gods who long for it. . . . The testing fork for the cauldron that cooks the flesh, the pots for pouring the broth, the cover of the bowls to keep it warm, the hooks, the dishes—all these attend the horse. . . . If someone riding you has struck you too hard with heel or whip when you shied, I make all these things well again for you with prayer. . . . The ax cuts through the thirty-four ribs of the racehorse who is the companion of the gods. Keep the limbs undamaged and place them in the proper pattern. Cut them apart, calling out piece by piece. . . . Let not your dear soul burn you as you go away. Let not the ax do lasting harm to your body. Let no greedy, clumsy slaughterer hack in the wrong place and damage your limbs with his knife. You do not really die through this, nor are you harmed. You go to the gods on paths pleasant to go on (1.162).

The poet thus intermittently addresses the horse (and himself) with the consolation that all will be restored in heaven, words in which we may see the first stirrings of ambivalence about the killing of a beloved animal, even in a religious ceremony, an ambivalence that will become much more explicit in the next few centuries. We may see even here a kind of “ritual nonviolence” that is also expressed in a concern that the victim should not bleed or suffer or cry out (one reason why the sacrificial animal was strangled).²⁹ The euphemism for the killing of the horse, pacifying (shanti), further muted the growing uneasiness associated with the killing of an animal. Moreover, unlike cows, goats, and other animals that were sacrificed, many in the course of the horse sacrifice, the horse was not actually eaten (though it was cooked and served to the gods). Certain parts of the horse’s carcass (such as the marrow, or the fat from the chest, or the vapa, the caul, pericardium, or omentum containing the internal organs) were offered to Agni, the god of the fire, and the consecrated king and the priests would inhale the cooking fumes (regarded as “half-eating-by-smelling” the cooked animal). The gods and priests, as well as guests at the sacrificial feast, ate the cattle (mostly rams, billy goats, and steers); only the gods and priests ate the soma; no one ate the horse. Perhaps the horse was not eaten because of the close relationship that the Vedic people, like most Indo-Europeans, ³⁰ had with their horses, who not only speak, on occasion,³¹ but are often said to shed tears^bi when their owners die.³²

THE VEDIC PEOPLE

The Rig Veda tells us a lot (as in the passage cited at the start of this chapter, a kind of liturgical work song) about family life, about everyday tasks, about craftsmanship, about the materials of sacrifice, and even about diversity. Evidently the rigid hereditary system of the professions characteristic of the caste system was not yet in place now, for the professions at this time varied even within a single family, where a poet could be the son of a physician and a miller. The Rig Veda tells us of many professions, including carpenters, blacksmiths, potters, tanners, reed workers, and weavers.³³ But by the end of this period, the class system was in place.

THE FOUR CLASSES AND THE PRIMEVAL MAN

The Vedic people at first distinguished just two classes (varnas), their own (which they called Arya) and that of the people they conquered, whom they called Dasas (or Dasyus, or, sometimes, Panis). The Dasas may have been survivorsof early migrations of Vedic people, or people who spoke non-Sanskritic languages, or a branch of the Indo-Iranian people who had a religion different from that of the Vedic people.³⁴ (In the Indo-Iranian Avesta, daha and dahyu designate “other people.”³⁵) The early Veda expresses envy for the Dasas’ wealth, which is to say their cattle, but later, “Dasa” came to be used to denote a slave or subordinate, someone who worked outside the family, and the late parts of the Veda mention Brahmins who were “sons of slave women” (Dasi-putra), indicating an acceptance of interclass sexual relationships, if not marriage. We have noted evidence that the Vedic people took significant parts of their material culture from communities in place in India before they arrived, Dasas of one sort or another. The Dasas may also have introduced new ritual practices such as those recorded in the Atharva Veda. (The Nishadas, tribal peoples, were also associated with some early rituals.³⁶)

But the more important social division was not into just two classes (Arya and Dasa, Us and Them) but four. A poem in one of the latest books of the Rig Veda, “Poem of the Primeval Man” (Purusha-Sukta [10.90]), is about the dismemberment of the cosmic giant, the Primeval Man (purushalater comes to designate any male creature, indeed the male gender), who is the victim in a Vedic sacrifice that creates the whole universe.^bj The poem says, “The gods, performing the sacrifice, bound the Man as the sacrificial beast. With the sacrifice the gods sacrificed to the sacrifice.” Here the “sacrifice” designates both the ritual and the victim killed in the ritual; moreover, the Man is both the victim that the gods sacrificed and the divinity to whom the sacrifice was dedicated—that is, he is both the subject and the object of the sacrifice. This Vedic chicken or egg paradox is repeated in a more general pattern, in which the gods sacrifice to the gods, and a more specific pattern, in which one particular god, Indra, king of the gods, sacrifices (as a king) to himself (as a god). But it is also a tautological way of thinking that we have seen in the myths of mutual creation and will continue to encounter in Hindu mythology.

The four classes of society come from the appropriate parts of the body of the dismembered Primeval Man. His mouth became the priest (the Brahmin, master of sacred speech); all Vedic priests are Brahmins, though not all Brahmins are priests. His arms were the Raja (the Kshatriya, the Strong Arm, the class of warriors, policemen, and kings); his thighs, the commoner (the Vaishya, the fertile producer, the common people, the third estate, who produce the food for the first two and themselves); and his feet—the lowest and dirtiest part of the body—the servants (Shudras), the outside class within society that defines the other classes. That the Shudras were an afterthought is evident from the fact that the third class, Vaishyas, is sometimes said to be derived from the word for “all” and therefore to mean “everyone,” leaving no room for anyone below them—until someone added a class below them.^bk The fourth social class may have consisted of the people new to the early Vedic system, perhaps the people already in India when the Vedic people entered, the Dasas, from a system already in place in India, or simply the sorts of people who were always outside the system. The final combination often functioned not as a quartet but, reverting to the pattern of Arya and Dasa, as a dualism: all of us (in the first three classes, the twice born) versus all of them (in the fourth class, the non-us, the Others).^bl

“Poem of the Primeval Man” ranks the kings below the priests. The supremacy of Brahmins was much contested throughout later Hindu literature and in fact may have been nothing but a Brahmin fantasy. Many texts argue, or assume, that Kshatriyas never were as high as Brahmins, and others assume that they always were, and still are, higher than Brahmins. Buddhist literature puts the kings at the top, the Brahmins second,³⁷ and many characters in Hindu texts also defend this viewpoint.

The French sociologist Georges Dumézil (1898-1986) argued that the ^bkIndo-European speakers had been divided into three social classes or functions: at the top, kings who were also priests, then warriors who were also policemen, and then the rest of the people.³⁸ Some scholars find this hypothetical division useful; some do not³⁹ and some think that other cultures too were divided in this way, so that tripartition is not a useful way to distinguish Indo-European culture from any other.^bm (It rather suspiciously resembles the reactionary French ancient regime, which put priests at the top, over aristocrats, and the people in the third group below.) In any case, by the end of the period in which the Rig Veda was composed, a fourfold social system that deviates in two major regards from the Dumézilian model was in place: It adds a fourth class at the bottom, and it reverses the status of kings and priests. The kings have come down one rung from their former alleged status of sharing first place with the Brahmins. This, then, would have been one of the earliest documented theocratic takeovers, a silent, totally mental palace coup, the Brahmin forcing the Kshatriya out of first place.

Thus, even in “Poem of the Primeval Man,” supposedly postulating a social charter that was created at the very dawn of time and is to remain in place forever after, we can see, in the positioning of the kings in the second rank, movement, change, slippage, progress, or decay, depending upon your point of view. This sort of obfuscation is basic to mythology; the semblance of an un-moving eternity is presented in texts that themselves clearly document constant transformation. “Poem of the Primeval Man” may have been the foundational myth of the Brahmin class, establishing social hierarchies that are unknown to poems from an earlier layer of the Rig Veda, such as the poem “Diverse Callings.”

One Vedic poem that may incorporate a critique of Brahmins^bn is a tour de force that applies simultaneously, throughout, to frogs croaking at the start of the rainy season and to Brahmin priests who begin to chant at the start of the rains. It begins:

THE FROGS

After lying still for a year, Brahmins keeping their vow, the frogs have raised their voice that the god of the rainstorm has inspired. When the heavenly waters came upon him, dried out like a leather bag, lying in the pool, then the cries of the frogs joined in chorus like the lowing of cows with calves. As soon as the season of rains has come, and it rains upon them who are longing, thirsting for it, one approaches another who calls to him, “Akh-khala,” as a son approaches his father. One greets the other as they revel in the waters that burst forth, and the frog leaps about under the falling rain, the speckled one mingling his voice with the green one. One of them repeats the speech of the other, as a pupil that of a teacher (7.103.1-5).

Though this poem may have been a satire, its tone is serious, a metaphor in celebration of a crucial and joyous matter, the arrival of the rains.

OTHER OTHERS: MARGINALIZING INTOXICATION AND ADDICTION

The marginalized people in the lowest social levels of the Veda—Dasas, Shudras—may have included people who were Other not, or not only, in their social class but in their religious practices, such as the wandering bands of warrior ascetics the Vedas refer to as the Vratyas (“People Who Have Taken Vows”), who practiced flagellation and other forms of self-mortification and traveled from place to place in bullock carts.⁴⁰ Vratyas were sometimes regarded as inside, sometimes outside mainstream society;⁴¹ the Brahmins sought to bring them into the Vedic system by special purification rituals,⁴² and the Vratyas may have introduced some of their own beliefs and practices into Vedic religion.

Or the Others may have been drop-out and turn-on types like the protohippie described in another poem:

THE LONG-HAIRED ASCETIC

Long-Hair holds fire, holds the drug, holds sky and earth. . . . These ascetics, swathed in wind [i.e., naked], put dirty saffron rags on. “Crazy with asceticism, we have mounted the wind. Our bodies are all you mere mortals can see.” . . . Long-Hair drinks from the cup, sharing the drug with Rudra (10.136).”

The dirty rags identify these people as either very poor or willingly alienated from social conventions such as dress; that they wear saffron-colored robes may be an early form (hindsight alert!) of the ocher robes that later marked many renunciant groups. Rudra is the master of poison and medicines, but also of consciousness-altering drugs, one of which may have been used here, as such drugs often are, to induce the sensation of flying and of viewing one’s own body from outside. Rudra was the embodiment of wildness, unpredictable danger, and fever but also the healer and cooler, who attacks “like a ferocious wild beast” (2.33). He lives on the margins of the civilized world as one who comes from the outside, an intruder, and is excluded from the Vedic sacrifice. He is a hunter. He stands for what is violent, cruel, and impure in the society of gods or at the edge of the divine world.⁴³

The Rig Veda also tells us of people marginalized not by class or religious practices but by their antisocial behavior under the influence of some addiction. One Vedic poem lists “wine, anger, dice, or carelessness” as the most likely cause of serious misbehavior (7.86.1-8). Wine and dice are two of the four addictive vices of lust (sex and hunting being the other two), to which considerable attention was paid throughout Indian history. We have seen dice in the Indus Valley Civilization, and we will see gambling with dice remain both a major pastime (along with chariot racing and hunting) and the downfall of kings. Ordinary people as well as kings could be ruined by gambling, as is evident from the stark portrayal of a dysfunctional family in this Vedic poem:

THE GAMBLER

“She did not quarrel with me or get angry; she was kind to my friends and to me. Because of a losing throw of the dice I have driven away a devoted wife. My wife’s mother hates me, and my wife pushes me away. The man in trouble finds no one with sympathy. They all say, ‘I find a gambler as useless as an old horse that someone wants to sell.’ Other men fondle the wife of a man whose possessions have been taken by the plundering dice. His father, mother, and brothers all say of him, ‘We do not know him. Tie him up and take him away.’ When I swear, ‘I will not play with them,’ my friends leave me behind and go away. But when the brown dice raise their voice as they are thrown down, I run at once to the rendezvous with them, like a woman to her lover.” . . . The deserted wife of the gambler grieves, and the mother grieves for her son who wanders anywhere, nowhere. In debt and in need of money, frightened, he goes at night to the houses of other men. It torments the gambler to see his wife the woman of other men, in their comfortable rooms. But he yoked the brown horses in the early morning, and at evening he fell down by the fire, no longer a man (10.34).

Like a character in a Dostoyevsky novel, the gambler prays not to win but just to stop losing, indeed to stop playing altogether; his inability to stop is likened to a sexual compulsion or addiction. The “brown horses” that he yokes may be real horses or a metaphor for the brown dice; in either case, they destroy him. (The gambler’s wife who is fondled by other men reappears in the Mahabharata when the wife of the gambler Yudhishthira is stripped in the public assembly.) At the end of the poem, a god (Savitri, the god of the rising and setting sun) warns the gambler, “Play no longer with the dice, but till your field; enjoy what you possess, and value it highly. There are your cattle, and there is your wife.”

DRINKING SOMA

Intoxication, though not addiction, is a central theme of the Veda, since the sacrificial offering of the hallucinogenic juice of the soma plant was an element of several important Vedic rituals. The poets who “saw” the poems were inspired both by their meditations and by drinking the soma juice. The poems draw upon a corpus of myths about a fiery plant that a bird brings down from heaven; soma is born in the mountains or in heaven, where it is closely guarded; an eagle brings soma to earth (4.26-7) or to Indra (4.18.13), or the eagle carries Indra to heaven to bring the soma^bo to humans and gods (4.27.4). This myth points to the historical home of the soma plant in the mountains, probably the mountain homeland of the Vedic people. We do not know for sure what the soma plant was⁴⁴(pace a recent lawsuit^bp over a copyright for it⁴⁵), but we know what it was not: It was not ephedra (Sarcostemma) or wine or beer or brandy or marijuana or opium.^bq It may have been the mushroom known as the Amanita muscaria or fly agaric (called mukhomorin Russian, Pfliegenpilz in German, tue-mouche or crapaudin in French).⁴⁶ It appears to produce the effects of a hallucinogen (or “entheogen”⁴⁷): “Like impetuous winds, the drinks have lifted me up, like swift horses bolting with a chariot. Yes! I will place the earth here, or perhaps there. One of my wings is in the sky; I have trailed the other below. I am huge, huge! flying to the cloud. Have I not drunk soma? (10.119).” Another soma hymn begins with the same phrase that ends the poem just cited (“Have I not drunk Soma?”), now no longer a question: “We have drunk the soma; we have become immortal; we have gone to the light; we have found the gods. What can hatred and the malice of a mortal do to us now? The glorious drops that I have drunk set me free in wide space (8.48.3).” The feeling of expansiveness, of being set free “in wide space,” is not merely a Vedic political agenda, an expression of the lust for those wide-open spaces; it is also a subjective experience of exhilaration and ecstasy. Human poets drink soma only in small quantities and in the controlled context of the ritual. But for the gods who depend upon it, soma can become an addiction (the bolting horses in the hymn cited above recur as a metaphor for senses out of control). Later poets depict Indra, the great soma drinker, as suffering from a bad hangover, in which he cannot stop substances from flowing from all the orifices of his body.⁴⁸

MRS. INDRA AND OTHER FEMALES

The gambler’s wife is one of a more general company of long-suffering wives, devoted but often deserted, who people ancient Hindu literature and the society that this literature reflects. In the Rig Veda, a text dominated by men in a world dominated by men, women appear throughout the poems as objects. Like the gambler whom Savitri warned, every Vedic man valued equally his two most precious possessions, his cattle and his wife. A man needed a wife to be present when he performed any Vedic sacrifice, though she had to stay behind a screen.⁴⁹ Women also appear occasionally as subjects, even as putative authors, of Vedic poems (10.40, 8.91).⁵⁰ And women may have had a voice in poems that treat women’s interests sympathetically, such as magic spells to incapacitate rival wives and to protect unborn children in the womb (10.184), and in the Vedic ritual that an unmarried virgin performs to get a husband.⁵¹ One of these latter poems is appropriately dedicated to Indrani (“Mrs. Indra”), the wife of Indra (who is, like his Indo-European counterparts—the Greek Zeus and the Norse Odin, German Wotan—a notorious philanderer). It says, in part: “I dig up this plant, the most powerful thing that grows, with which one drives out the rival wife and wins the husband entirely for oneself. I will not even take her name into my mouth; he takes no pleasure in this person. Make the rival wife go far, far into the distance. [She addresses her husband:] Let your heart run after me like a cow after a calf, like water running in its own bed (10.145).” Some spells, like this spell to protect the embryo, are directed against evil powers but addressed to human beings, in this case the pregnant woman: “The one whose name is evil, who lies with disease upon your embryo, your womb, the flesh eater; the one who kills the embryo as it settles, as it rests, as it stirs, who wishes to kill it when it is born—we will drive him away from here. The one who spreads apart your two thighs, who lies between the married pair, who licks the inside of your womb—we will drive him away from here. The one who by changing into a brother, or husband, or lover lies with you, who wishes to kill your offspring—we will drive him away from here. The one who bewitches you with sleep or darkness and lies with you—we will drive him away from here (10.162).”

There is precise human observation here of what we would call the three trimesters of pregnancy (when the embryo settles, rests, and stirs). Though the danger ultimately comes from supernatural creatures, ogres, such creatures act through humans, by impersonating the husband (or lover! or brother!) of the pregnant woman. This poem provides, among things, evidence that a woman might be expected to have a lover, a suspicion substantiated by a Vedic ritual in which the queen is made to list her lovers of the past year,^br though that moment in the ritual may represent nothing more than a “jolt of sexual energy” that the wife, as locus of sexuality, particularly illicit sexuality (since most forms of sex were licit for men), was charged to provide for the ritual.⁵² More substantial is the early evidence in this poem of a form of rape that came to be regarded as a bad, but legitimate, form of marriage: having sex with a sleeping or drugged woman. It appears that a woman’s brother too is someone she might expect to find in her bed, though the Rig Veda severely condemns sibling incest;⁵³ it is also possible that the brother in question is her husband’s brother, a person who, as we shall see, can have certain traditional, though anxiety-producing, connections with his brother’s wife.^bs

Women were expected to live on after the deaths of their husbands, as we learn from lines in a funeral hymn addressed to the widow of the dead man: “Rise up, woman, into the world of the living. Come here; you are lying beside a man whose life’s breath has gone (10.18).” The poet urges the widow to go on living. Certainly she is not expected to die with her husband, though “lying beside a dead man” may have been a survival from an earlier period when the wife was actually buried with her husband;⁵⁴ the Atharva Veda regards the practice of the wife’s lying down beside her dead husband (but perhaps then getting up again) as an ancient custom.⁵⁵ On the other hand, women in the Vedic period may have performed a purely symbolic suicide on their husbands’ graves, which was later (hindsight alert!) cited as scriptural support for the actual self-immolation of widows on their husbands’ pyres called suttee.

Several poems explore the relationships between men and women, mortal and immortal. These poems present narratives centering on courtship, marriage, adultery, and estrangement, often in the form of conversations (akhyanas) that zero in on the story in medias res, taking it up at a crucial turning point in a plot that we are presumed to know (and that the later commentaries spell out for us).⁵⁶ The conversation poems, which often involve goddesses and heavenly nymphs, are particularly associated with fertility and may have been part of a special ritual performance involving actors and dancers.⁵⁷ The dialogues with women present situations in which one member of the pair attempts to persuade the other to engage in some sort of sexual activity; sometimes it is the woman who takes the role of persuader,⁵⁸ sometimes the man.⁵⁹ In general, the mortal women and immortal men are successful in their persuasion, while the quasi-immortal women and mortal men fail.⁶⁰

Apala, a mortal woman, has a most intimate relationship with Indra, as we gather from the story told in the poem attributed to her (a story spelled out by later commentaries) (8.91). She was a young woman whose husband hated her (“Surely we who are hated by our husbands should flee and unite with Indra,” v. 4) because she had a skin disease (the ritual makes her “sun-skinned,” v. 7). She found the soma plant (“A maiden going for water found soma by the way,” v. 1), pressed it in her mouth, and offered it to Indra (“Drink this that I have pressed with my teeth,” v. 2). Indra made love to her; she at first resisted (“We do not wish to understand you, and yet we do not misunderstand you,” v. 3) and then consented (“Surely he is able, surely he will do it, surely he will make us more fortunate,” v. 4). She asked him to cure her and to restore fertility to her father and to his fields (“Make these three places sprout, Indra: my daddy’s head and field, and this part of me below the waist,” v. 5-6). Indra accomplished this triple blessing (“Indra, you purified Apala three times,” v. 7) by a ritual that may have involved drawing Apala through three chariot holes (“in the nave of a chariot, in the nave of the cart, in the nave of the yoke,” v. 7), making her slough her skin three times (according to later tradition, the first skin became a porcupine, ^bt the second an alligator, and the third a chameleon⁶¹).

Apala wants to be “fortunate” (subhaga), a word that has three closely linked meanings: beautiful, therefore loved by her husband,^bu therefore fortunate. In other poems, a husband rejects his wife not because she lacks beauty but because he lacks virility (10.40); “fortunate” then assumes the further connotation of having a virile husband.^bv Finally, it means having a healthy husband, so that the woman does not become a widow. For his failing health too may be the woman’s fault; certain women are regarded as dangerous to men. For instance, the blood of the bride’s defloration threatens the groom: “It becomes a magic spirit walking on feet, and like the wife it draws near the husband (10.85.29).” The blood spirit takes the wife’s form, as the embryo-killing ogre takes the form of her husband/lover/brother. Sex is dangerous.

One long poem (10.85) celebrates the story of the marriage of the moon and the daughter of the sun, and another (10.17.1-2) briefly alludes to the marriage of the sun to the equine goddess Saranyu. But these are not simple hierogamies (sacred marriages), for the celestial gods also share our sexual frailties. To say that a marriage is made in heaven is not necessarily a blessing in the Vedic world; adultery too is made in heaven. (In the Ramayana [7.30], Indra’s adultery with a mortal woman creates adultery for the first time on earth.) The moon is unfaithful to the sun’s daughter when he runs off with the wife of the priest of the gods (Brihaspati) (10.109). And the sun’s wife, Saranyu, the daughter of the artisan and blacksmith Tvashtri, gives birth to twins (one of whom is Yama, god of the dead) but then runs away from the sun. She leaves in her place a double of herself, while she herself takes the form of a mare and gives birth to the horse-headed gods, the Ashvins (10.17.1-2).⁶² Saranyu belongs to a larger pattern of equine goddesses who abandon their husbands, for while stallions in Vedic ritual thinking are domesticated male animals (pashus), fit for sacrifice, mares belong to an earlier, mythic Indo-European level⁶³ in which horses were still thought of as wild animals, hunted and perhaps captured but never entirely tamed.

Not all the females in the Rig Veda are anthropomorphic. Abstract nouns (usually feminine) are sometimes personified as female divinities, such as Speech (Vach)⁶⁴ and Destruction (Nirriti). There are also natural entities with feminine names, such as Dawn and Night and the Waters (including the Sarasvati River) and terrestrial goddesses, such as the nymphs (Apsarases), the forest, and Earth (Prithivi), who is regarded as a mother. And there are divine wives, named after their husbands (Mrs. Indra, Mrs. Surya, Mrs. Rudra, Mrs. Varuna, Mrs. Agni)⁶⁵ and at least one divine husband, named after his rather abstract wife: Indra is called the Lord of Shachi (shachi-pati), pati meaning “husband” or “master” (literally “protector”) and shachi meaning “power” (from the verb shak or shach). Together, they suggest that Indra is the master of power or married to a goddess named Shachi, which became another name for Indrani. So too later goddesses played the role of the shakti (another form derived from the same verb) that empowered the male gods. But no goddesses (except Vach, “Speech”) have any part in the sacrifice that was the heart of Vedic religion.⁶⁶

Most Vedic creator gods (like most Vedic gods in general) are male, but one Vedic poem imagines cosmic creation through the down-to-earth image of a female, called Aditi (“Without Limits,” “Infinity”), who gives birth to a baby:

ADITI GIVES BIRTH

Let us now speak with wonder of the births of the gods—so that some one may see them when the poems are chanted in this later age. In the earliest age of the gods, existence was born from nonexistence. After this the quarters of the sky, and the earth, were born from her who crouched with legs spread. From female Infinity (Aditi), male dexterity (Daksha) was born, and from male dexterity (Daksha), female infinity (Aditi) was born. After her were born the blessed gods, the kinsmen of immortality (10.72.1-5).

The dominant visual image of this poem is the goddess of infinity, who crouches with legs stretched up (uttana-pad), more particularly with knees drawn up and legs spread wide,^bw a term that designates a position primarily associated with a woman giving birth.⁶⁷This position is later associated with yoga and might have yogic overtones even in this period.

Again we encounter the paradox of mutual creation:^bx The female principle of infinity and the male principle of virile dexterity create each other as Brahma and Vishnu will later create each other. A Vedic commentary takes pains to explain that for the gods, two births can mutually produce each other.⁶⁸ The creator often has the tautological name of “self-existing” or “self-created” (svayambhu ):^by He creates himself, as does circular time itself, and the cosmos, according to the theory of the four Ages.

POLYTHEISM AND KATHENOTHEISM

In the house of the Rig Veda there are many divine mansions. We have noted the importance of multiplicity to Hindus and Hinduism, and it begins here. The Rig Veda has a kind of polytheism, but one that already has in it the first seeds of what will flower, in the philosophical texts called the Upanishads, into monism (which assumes that all living things are elements of a single, universal substance). A much-quoted line proclaims this singular multiplicity, in a context that is clearly theological rather than philosophical: “They call it Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni, and it is the heavenly bird that flies. The wise speak of what is One in many ways; they call it Agni, Yama, Matarishvan” (1.164.46). This is a tolerant, hierarchical sort of devotional polytheism: The worshiper acknowledges the existence, and goodness, of gods other than the god that he or she is addressing at the moment. This creative tension between monism and polytheism extends through the history of Hinduism.

The polytheism of Vedic religion is actually a kind of serial monotheism that Müller named henotheism or kathenotheism, the worship of a number of gods, one at a time, regarding each as the supreme, or even the only, god while you are talking to him. Thus one Vedic poem will praise a god and chalk up to his account the credit for separating heaven and earth, propping them apart with a pillar, but another Vedic poem will use exactly the same words to praise another god. (In addition, each god would have characteristics and deeds that are his alone; no one but Indra cures Apala.) Bearing in mind the way in which the metaphor of adultery has traditionally been used by monotheistic religions to stigmatize polytheism (“whoring after other gods”), and used by later Hinduism to characterize the love of god, we might regard this attitude as a kind of theological parallel to serial monogamy, or, if you prefer, open hierogamos: “You, Vishnu, are the only god I’ve ever worshiped; you are the only one.” “You, Varuna, are the only god I’ve ever worshiped; you are the only one.” “You, Susan, are the only woman I’ve ever loved; you are the only one.” “You, Helen, are the only woman I’ve ever loved; you are the only one.” Vedic kathenotheism made possible a quasihierarchical pantheon; the attitude to each god was hierarchical, but the various competing practical monotheisms canceled one another out, so that the total picture was one of equality; each of several was the best (like the pigs on George Orwell’s Animal Farm: They’re all equal, but some are more equal than others).

This time-sharing property of the Vedic gods is an example of individual pluralism: Each individual worshiper would know, and might use, several different poems to different gods. And the text is intolerant of intolerance. One Rig Vedic poem curses people who accuse others of worshiping false gods or considering the gods useless (7.104.14). When the double negatives in this statement cross one another out, we are left with an extraordinary defense of heretics and atheists. But the broader intellectual pluralism of the Vedas regards the world, or the deity, or truth itself as plural; the Vedas tackle the problem of ontology from several (plural) different angles, branching off from an ancient and still ongoing argument about the way the world is, about whether it is basically uniform or basically multiform.

One Vedic poem ends: “Where did this creation come from? The gods came afterward, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows where it came from? Where it came from—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 (10.129).” There is a charming humility and open-mindedness in this poem, which begins, most confusingly, with the statement “There was neither existence nor nonexistence then”—easy enough to say, impossible actually to visualize. Its final phrase (“or perhaps he does not know”) seems almost to mock the rhetoric in the line that comes right before it: “—the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows.” The poem asks a question about the very nature, perhaps the very existence, of god.

The unanswered cosmic question (“Who really knows?”) recurs in the Rig Veda in another cosmogonic poem, in which each stanza ends with the questioning refrain: “Who is the god whom we should worship with the oblation?” Thus: “He by whom the awesome sky and the earth were made firm, by whom the dome of the sky was propped up, and the sun, who measured out the middle realm of space—who is the god whom we should worship with the oblation? (10.121).” The Veda shows a tolerance, a celebration of plurality, even in asking unanswerable questions about the beginnings of all things.

AGNI, INDRA, AND VARUNA

The great gods of later Hinduism, Vishnu and Shiva (in the form of Rudra), make only cameo appearances in the Veda.⁶⁹ By contrast, the most important gods of the Veda, such as Agni, Soma, Indra, and Varuna, all closely tied to the Vedic sacrifice, become far less important in later Hinduism, though they survive as symbolic figures of natural forces: fire, the moon, rain, and the waters, respectively. Other Vedic gods too are personifications of natural forces, particularly solar gods, as Müller rightly noted but overemphasized. (He was mocked for it too; one scholar wrote an article proving that by his own criteria, Max Müller himself was a solar god.⁷⁰) There are exquisite poems to the goddesses Dawn (1.92) and Night (10.127) and to the god Surya, the sun.

But most of the gods, even those representing natural forces, are vividly anthropomorphized. The gods are like us, only more so. They want what we want, things like marriage (and adultery), and fame, and praise. And most of the gods are closely associated with particular social classes: Agni is the Brahmin, Varuna the Brahminical sovereign, Indra the warrior, and the Ashvins the Vaishyas. There are no Shudra gods in the Vedas.

Agni, god of fire, serves as the divine model for the sacrificial priest, the messenger who carries the oblation from humans to the gods, brings all the gods to the sacrifice, and intercedes between gods and humans (1.26.3). When Agni is pleased, the gods become generous. The building of the fire altar is a foundational Vedic ceremony,⁷¹ and the kindling and maintaining of three fires—the household fire (Garhapatya), the ceremonial fire (Dakshina), and the sacrificial fire (Ahavaniya)—were a basic responsibility of every householder.

Agni and Soma connect in many ways. As fire and liquid they are complementary oppositions that unite in the concept of the fiery liquid, the elixir of immortality, or ambrosia; Soma is the fiery fluid and Agni the fluid fire. As ritual elements, the embodiments of the sacrificial fire and the sacrificial drink, they are invoked more than any other gods of the Rig Veda. As metaphorical symbols they are the pivot of speculations about the nature of the cosmos. Their mythologies join in the image of the sunbird, a form of Agni (the firebird) who brings Soma to earth (10.123, 177). They are two contrasting sources of the inspiration that enables the Vedic poet to understand the meaning of the sacrifice and of his life: Where Soma is Dionysian, representing the wild, raw, disruptive aspect of rituals, Agni is Apollonian, representing the cultivated, cooked, cultured aspects of rituals. The Vedic sacrifice needs both of them.

Indra, the king of the gods, the paradigmatic warrior, and the god of rain, is (in English) a homonym: He reigns and he rains. As the great soma drinker he appears often in the soma poems, and he is the one who brings Agni back when the antigods (Asuras) steal him (10.51, 124). The poets also praise Indra for freeing the cows that have been stolen and hidden in a cave (3.31, 10.108), but his greatest deed is the killing of the dragon Vritra, who is called a Dasa, and who dams up the waters, causing a drought (1.32). Both Indra and Vritra are drinkers, but Vritra cannot hold his soma as Indra can (on this occasion). By killing Vritra, Indra simultaneously releases the waters or rains that Vritra has held back and conquers the enemies of the Vedic people, getting back the waters and the cows trapped in the cave.

This myth of dragon slaying, linked to the myth of the cattle raid,⁷² is foundational to the Kshatriya class,^bz as “Poem of the Primeval Man” is for the Brahmin class. Indra’s famous generosity—particularly when he is high on soma—and his endearing anthropomorphism emboldened at least one poet to imagine himself in Indra’s place (8.14). But these same qualities may have led worshipers even in Vedic times to devalue Indra;^ca one poem records doubts about his existence: “He about whom they ask, ‘Where is he?’ or say, ‘He does not exist,’—believe in him! He, my people, is Indra (2.12.5).” Yet even that poem ultimately affirms Indra’s existence.

Varuna combines aspects of the roles of priest and king. His original function was that of a sky god, in particular the god of the waters in the heavenly vault (Ouranos, also a sky god, is his Greek counterpart). But by the time of the Rig Veda Varuna had developed into a god whose primary role was watching over human behavior (as a sky god was well situated to do) and punishing those who violated the sacred law (rita) of which Varuna was the most important custodian. He would snare miscreants in his bonds (pasha), which often revealed their presence through disease.

One hymn to Varuna is extraordinary in its introspective tone, its sense of personal unworthiness and uncertainty (“What did I do?”):

VARUNA’S ANGER AND MERCY

I ask my own heart, “When shall I be close to Varuna? Will he enjoy my offering and not be provoked to anger? When shall I see his mercy and rejoice?” I ask myself what the transgression was, Varuna, for I wish to understand. I turn to the wise to ask them. The poets have told me the very same thing: “Varuna has been provoked to anger against you.” O Varuna, what was the terrible crime for which you wish to destroy your friend who praises you? Proclaim it to me so that I may hasten to prostrate myself before you and be free from error, for you are hard to deceive and are ruled by yourself alone. Free us from the harmful deeds of our fathers and from those that we have committed with our own bodies. The mischief was not done by my own free will, Varuna; wine, anger, dice, or carelessness led me astray. The older shares in the mistake of the younger. Even sleep does not avert evil. As a slave serves a generous master, so would I serve the furious god and be free from error (7.86).

The poem assumes that on the one hand, one may not be blamed, or perhaps not entirely blamed, for errors committed under the influence of passionate emotions, and on the other hand, one may be punished not only for conscious errors but also for errors committed unconsciously, in sleep, or even by other people (both one’s parents and one’s children). The idea that one person can be punished for the crime of another person is the flip side of an idea implicit in the Vedic sacrifice, which the priest performs for the benefit of someone else, the sacrificial patron (yajamana, in Sanskrit). This idea becomes much more important in later Hinduism, in texts that characterize the Vedic transaction as one in which the ritual transfers to the sponsor the good karma that the priest generates. Eventually—to fast-forward for a moment—the idea of the transfer of good karma in a ritual act with effects in this life develops into the idea of the moral consequences of any act, not only in this life but also in future lives.

DEATH

Just as the Vedic poets speculate in various contrasting, even conflicting ways about the process of creation, so too do they vary in their speculations about death and in the questions they ask about death. The poets view death and sleep as a part of chaos, in contrast with the ordering of life in the hierarchy of social classes.^cb Death in the Vedas is something to be avoided as long as possible; one hopes only to escape premature death, never to live forever; the prayer is that people should die in the right order, that children should not die before their parents (10.18.5). Surprisingly for a document so devoted to war and sacrifice, both of which involve killing, the Rig Veda actually says relatively little about death. What it does say, however, is comforting: For the virtuous, death is a hazy but pleasant place.

The poet says, speaking of the creator, “His shadow is immortality—and death,” and he prays, “Deliver me from death, not from immortality (7.59.12).” By “immortality” the ancient sages meant not an actual eternity of life—even the gods do not live forever, though they live much longer than we do, and they never age—but rather a full life span (usually conceived of as seventy or a hundred years). When it comes to the inevitable end of that span, the Rig Veda offers varied but not necessarily contradictory images of a rather muted version of life on earth: shade (remember how hot India is), lots of good-looking women (this heaven is imagined by men), and good things to eat and drink. There is also some talk about a deep pit into which evil spirits and ogres are to be consigned forever, but no evidence that human sinners would be sent there (7.104).

The poems also propose many different nonsolutions to the insoluble problem of death, many different ways that the square peg of the fact of death cannot be fitted into the round hole of human rationality. These approaches are often aware of one another; they react against one another and incorporate one another, through the process of intertextuality. And there is general agreement on some points, such as that the dead person would go to the House of Clay, to be punished, or to the World of the Fathers, to be rewarded.⁷³

FAST-FORWARD: REINCARNATION

The Rig Veda is more concerned with the living than with the dead, as is clear from the way texts address mourners (10.18), but they also address the corpse: “Leaving behind all imperfections, go back home again; merge with a glorious body (10.14.8).” Despite this “glorious body” with which the dead person unites, another poem expresses concern that the old body be preserved and confidence that this will be so. The poem begins by addressing the funeral fire: “Do not burn him entirely, Agni, or engulf him in your flames. Do not consume his skin or his flesh. When you have cooked him perfectly, only then send him forth to the fathers (10.16.1).” Not only is the fire not to destroy the body, but it is to preserve it.^cc Speaking to the dead man, the poem says: “Whatever the black bird has pecked out of you, or the ant, the snake, or even a beast of prey, may Agni who eats all things make it whole (10.16.6).” (Something very similar was said of and to the sacrificial horse, as we have seen.)

When this poem addresses the dead man, it speaks of the ultimate cosmic dispersal of the old body: “May your eye go to the sun, 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 (10.16.3).” (This dismembermentis reversed in “Poem of the Primeval Man” (10.90): “The moon was born from his mind; from his eye the sun was born.”) And then it asks Agni to let the dead man “join with a body (10.16.5).”

The fate of the dead was a site of contention that was not tackled head-on until the Upanishads began to meditate philosophically on the ritual and mythology of the Vedas, and it was not fully explored until the full flourishing of Indian philosophy. Yet ever dogged by hindsight, our unshakable bête noire, we might note even in the Vedic poems some rather vague intimations of transmigration. ⁷⁴ “Take root in the plants with your limbs (10.16.3)” might be a hint of the sort of rebirth in plants that the Upanishads are going to describe in detail, especially when that verse is coupled, later in that same poem, with a rather suggestive, if cryptic, allusion to rebirth: “Let him reach his own descendants, dressing himself in a life span (10.16.5).” This verse can be interpreted to mean that Agni shold let the dead person come back to his former home and to his offspring.⁷⁵ The dead in the Upanishads come back to the earth in the form of rain, and that idea may be encoded here too. Though a line in another poem, which expresses several rather different views of the fate of the dead, reverts to the idea of heaven, it also hints at the importance of the record of good deeds—which is to say, good karma: “Unite with the fathers, with Yama [king of the dead], with the rewards of your sacrifices and good deeds, in the highest heaven (10.14.7).” But these are, at best, but the early, murky stirrings of a doctrine that will become clear only in the Brahmanas and Upanishads.