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 Brahminsbn 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 somabo 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 lawsuitbp 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 mukhomor in 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 expres
sion 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
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