On the gods of the Rig Veda
Kasmai devaye havisha vidhema (Which god should we offer this sacrifice to?)
The Rig Veda fascinates me. It is not only an anthology of hymns to a pantheon that we honour, but is also, simultaneously, a tableau of our own attention-maps. Along with reading the Rig Veda hymn by hymn, I also treated it as a dataset. I counted which gods receive the most hymns, which gods are invoked together, how they vary across the mandals, and what these patterns might tell us about the Vedic imagination. Which gods do we fear and worship the most (and the least)? Which gods were once regarded as the greatest but have now been relegated to a somewhat lower order? What held our attention and faith throughout the vicissitudes of existing and thriving in our lands?
To begin with, who are the gods in the Rig Veda? How often are they invoked?
The pie charts show the share of suktas among the gods in the Rig Veda. At first glance, the following things stand out:
- Indra dominates. And, Agni is almost as important as Indra.
- There’s a huge ‘Others’ category. So huge, in fact, that this long tail gets exploded into two smaller charts, and still ends up with a large ‘Others’ category.
- Soma, who is at once a god, a plant, and a drink, is at #3.
- Vishnu and Rudra rank lower (they appear only in Pie chart 2a) than the Ashwini twins, who are very visible in Pie chart 1 but are nowhere to be seen in any temple today. Why did they fade from public memory despite being honey-hued healers, rushing everywhere to bring comfort to the distressed?
- The third chart (Pie chart 2b) is full of things that feel strange as objects of hymns. Subandhu’s spirit?! Ah, therein lies a story. It’s a story about a king who, on the instigation of a crafty duo, dismissed his family priests (Subandhu and brothers) and appointed the duo in their stead. How Subandhu was rendered senseless by this duo, and how his brothers coaxed his spirit to return to his body, is the subject matter of a few suktas in the Rig Veda. Perhaps a story for another day.
But the chart also raises a question: Who makes up such a long tail, individually negligible but collectively larger than Indra himself? Can I draw up a ranking based on how frequently a god was sung to?
This chart shows that almost 125 gods (55.3%) have only one or two songs to them, and it’s the remaining 100 that, progressively, keep getting a larger share of the suktas till there’s a sharp jump for about a dozen gods. Even among this dozen, the top 2 gods (Indra and Agni) are the top 2 by an extremely wide margin.
Which, then, makes me ask: If Indra and Agni dominate, is it because they are invoked alone, or is it because they accompany everyone else? The next chart separates solo calls from collective invocations.
What I see in this chart for the top 18 gods is this:
- Indra, Agni, and the Ashwini twins appear alone almost as frequently as they are paired with others.
- Soma is a loner, with the highest proportion of solo calls.
- The remaining gods tend towards being part of a group.
In this chart, I have not included the entire pantheon of gods (due to space constraints) but if I had, you would’ve seen that 155 gods are never ever invoked alone. That’s more than half the pantheon, at 68.6%.
The following divine beings are almost always invoked together, as a group: Nakt, Usha, Ila, Saraswati, Grass, Vanaspati, Door, Svaha, Tvashta. Not surprising at all, come to think of it. Because it is at that silent, liminal moment when night (Nakt) is bleeding into dawn (Usha) that our minds open to receive the inspiration we need to forge and carve our own selves into offerings that blend into the very earth that sustains us, is it not?
Is that the reason why this Usha-Nakt group is at the core of many Apri hymns (which are a very specific formula of hymns that precede an offering made to one’s chosen god)?
But that’s just one striking “collective”. Are there others? I found no other such remarkable groups, but I did notice that some of the top gods continually keep appearing in each other’s suktas: Agni, Mitra, Varun, Marut, Pushan, the Ashwin twins, Vishwadeva, Aryama, Bhaga, and Aditi. It’s almost like they are travelling companions, hopping on to each other’s chariots whenever a situation so demands.
Are there any special pairings, though, I asked. And found that, indeed, there were.
Mitra and Varun are virtually inseparable. They are called together 30% more often than any other god pair. What is even more striking is that of his 90 invocations, Mitra has only 1 solo invocation; of Varun’s 113 calls, only 8 are for Varun alone. They exist together. Later Puranic lore tells me that they even fathered sons together: both Agastya and Vasishth (themselves poets of the Rig Veda) are sons of these two gods and hence bear the patronymic Maitravaruni.
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The other inseparable pair is Dyau and Prithivi. Heaven and Earth. They’re called together 30 times when Dyau has 31 total invocations and Prithivi has 33. It means that almost every appearance of theirs is together.
It’s almost as if many gods are meaningful less in isolation than in ritual situations where blessings are needed from all cosmos. To me, this suggests that divinity in the Rig Veda is situational. Some of the gods aren’t ‘gods’ in the usual sense but have become sacred and worship-worthy for a small time in a very specific context. Like those shining planets that flare briefly into visibility before vanishing behind the brighter sun and moon.
Which brings me to the next question, the one about dominance. Why are some gods so dominant? Is it because they cluster in any of the mandals, and these mandals are the largest ones? Or is there a winner-takes-all theme here, where three or four gods corner almost the entire corpus?
Here’s a chart that shows the prominence of gods across mandals. By prominence, I mean the share of total suktas in a mandal.
This chart displays only the nine most prominent gods in each mandal and, therefore, the percentages in each column might not add up to 100%. The remainder represents the long tail of other gods.
I see some interesting patterns here:
- Mandal 9 is dominated almost entirely by just one god, namely, Soma. The god who’s described as the shining drop of nectar in the sky. Had mandal 9 not been there in the Rig Veda corpus, Soma wouldn’t have been at rank #3 in the listings (of Figure 1) at all. Soma, the loner god, whose invocations are 75% solo invocations.
- Indra dominates almost all mandals, except mandal 9 (the Soma mandal) where he has zero prominence. In the mandals that he doesn’t dominate, he’s second, and it’s always to Agni.
- In mandals 2, 6, and 7, almost half the prominence is shared by other gods; in mandal 10, the other gods are actually in the majority.
- The Ashwini twins occupy the middle order (ranks 3 to 6) in several mandals.
- Pushan is at rank #3 in mandal 6, behind only Indra-Agni. He’s also the only god, along with Usha, who is present in every mandal (even though not as a top 9 god). Pushan, the animal-loving guide-god who leads a bride to her new marital home.
- The Ribhu brothers at rank #3 in mandal 4, behind only Indra-Agni, and they appear in all mandals except for mandal 9 (the Soma mandal). These brothers are human and are master craftsmen with magic fingers. By their expertise and industry, they won the right to sit at the same table as the gods and drink Soma with them.
- Usha is the only god other than Pushan who is present in every mandal, even when she isn’t among the top 9 gods (which she is in five mandals). Usha, she who rules the universal truth, the very cosmic order itself (ऋतस्य देवी).
What qualifies as ‘divine’, then, in the Rig Veda? Doors, grass, rivers, winds, herbs, plants, poison, frogs, birds, armour, chariots, they’re all gods. The divine order in the Rig Veda is not an immutable order, at least for the most part. Indra-Agni are the top 2 by a prominent margin, and Varun-Marut-Mitra are invoked often enough as are the Ashwini twins, so there is, indeed, a stable core. But then, there are gods like Soma, who have almost an entire mandal to themselves, and then there’s the long tail.
It’s noteworthy that the poet who wrote the title to this article (“kasmai devaye havisha vidhema”) never actually names his god either. For ten stanzas, the poet paints his concept of god as a shining, glorious entity, but ends every stanza by asking “and who is this being that we should give this sacrifice to”.
हिरण्यगर्भः समवर्तताग्रे भूतस्य जातः पतिरेक आसीत् । स दाधार पृथिवीं दयामुतेमां कस्मै देवाय हविषा विधेम ॥ RV, 10.121
The next question, then, is no longer about the gods themselves but about the poets who sang these hymns to them. Who were these poets? Did they favour certain gods? Did their hymns favour some specific metres? And did metre itself play any role in shaping their devotion?
That is where I’ll go next. These are stories that need separate articles.
I had imagined that treating the Rig Veda as a dataset would make it tidier. Instead, it has become gloriously untidy. Every time I lean back, confident that I’ve finally managed to arrange its world neatly into rows, columns, and pie charts, it deftly slips a god into a blade of grass or into a bowstring that whispers to its warrior, and asks me whether I counted that. Every chart answers one question only to raise two more. I count the gods, and the poets appear. I arrange the poets into neat rows, and the metres peep in from around the corner, grinning at me. I am beginning to suspect that this is how the Rig Veda prefers itself to be read.
Data sources: The Indica APIs (and all the books mentioned therein, and then some)
