Mid-Day Opinion: How was Atharva Veda different?

Illustration/Devdutt Pattanaik

The Rigveda praises the gods. The priest composes beautiful hymns, asks for cattle, sons, victory, rain. The relationship is simple: human below, god above, prayer going upward. The Atharva Veda works differently. The priest does not pray. He acts.

The Rigvedic world is fundamentally ordered. The gods maintain that order. The priest's job is to acknowledge it correctly through hymn and sacrifice. The Atharva Vedic world is full of threats. Disease, enemies, sorcerers, evil spirits, the hostile intentions of other people. Order is not the natural state. It has to be made and defended, constantly, by someone who knows how.

The practitioner who does this is not a priest in the Rigvedic sense. He is closer to a specialist, a technician. He does not compose hymns for gods. He speaks into things: plants, amulets, knotted cords, water, clay figures. The mantra charges the object. The object carries the force to wherever it needs to go. The grammar of the hymns shows this clearly. They are not requests. They are commands. When the Atharva Veda addresses the fever demon, it does not ask a god to remove him. It tells him directly to leave. It names where he should go. It threatens him.

This assumes a universe where forces travel between bodies and between people. Desire travels. Hatred travels. Disease can be sent. The body is not sealed off from the world around it. A trained practitioner can redirect these forces toward healing or toward harm. The healer and the sorcerer use the same knowledge. The Atharva Veda contains both without embarrassment, which is exactly why the Brahminical mainstream was uncomfortable with it and refused for centuries to count it as a Veda at all.

The Rigveda represents the strand that won institutional power, the liturgical, praise-centered, priest-managed tradition that became the official image of what the Vedas were. The Atharva Veda preserves something older and wider: a tradition rooted in the body, in daily anxiety, in the real concerns of people whose cattle fall sick, whose children get fever, whose marriages are threatened, whose enemies are real and close.

The great Upanishads that came out of this tradition - Mundaka, Mandukya, Prashna - are among the most philosophically ambitious in the entire canon. That is not an accident. A tradition already comfortable with the idea that power can be directly operated, that force moves through matter, that the practitioner acts rather than petitions, was naturally better placed to ask the deeper question: what is the source of all this force? What lies beneath everything that moves and acts and threatens and heals?

The Atharva priests were the Angirasa and the Bhrigus. The Atharva Veda priests did not figure in the first list of seven sages (Sapta Rishi). But they became powerful eventually. From Angirasa came Brihaspati, guru of the Devas. From Bhrigu came Shukra, guru of Asura. The two priests worked for both ends of the spectrum. Their spells were much sought after by kings even after the world of the Rig Veda collapsed. From Atharva Veda came Ayurveda, household rituals and family rites (Griha-sutra), social rules (Dharma-shastra) and even Tantra, which influenced later Hindu culture. The Rig Veda was almost forgotten, revived only by 19th century reformers.

The author writes and lectures on the relevance of mythology in modern times. Reach him at devdutt.pattanaik@mid-day.com