Hymns from the Rigveda (Photostat)

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Rigvedic deities are deities mentioned in the sacred texts of Rigveda, the principal text of the historical Vedic religion of the Vedic period (1500-500 ВСЕ).

There are 1,028 hymns (sukta) in the Rigveda. Most of these hymns are dedicated to specific deities.

The most prominent deity is Indra; Agni the sacrificial fire and messenger of the gods; and Soma, the ritual drink dedicated to Indra, are additional principal deities.

THIS little book contains a selection of forty hymns from the Rigveda, translated in verse corresponding as nearly as is possible in English to the original metres. I have endeavoured to make the rendering as close as the use of verse will admit. Prose would have been more exact if I had had in view the requirements of linguistic students, but the general reader, to whom the spirit of the original hymns is the important thing, would have lost the means of appreciating, to some extent at least, the poetic beauty of the Vedic metres which form a considerable element in the literary charm of the hymns.

Although there are four Vedas, this selection of hymns has been made exclusively from the oldest and most important, the Rigveda. From it the other three have largely borrowed their matter, containing other- wise little that would be of interest in this selection.

The chief metres are here reproduced, and each of the most important gods is represented by at least one hymn. Of the comparatively few hymns not addressed to deities, I have also chosen a certain number dealing with cosmogony and eschatology, social life and magical ideas. This volume thus furnishes an epitome of the Rigveda, the earliest monument of Indian thought, the source from which the poetical and religious literature of India has in great part been derived and developed during a period of more than three thousand years.

Or the four Vedas which constitute the earliest stage of Indian literature, the Rigveda is by far the most ancient and important. The exact period when its hymns were composed is a matter of conjecture. All that can be said is that the oldest of them cannot date from later than the thirteenth century B.C., because certain phases of literature subsequent to the Vedas are pre-supposed by Buddhism, which arose in the sixth century B.C. On the other hand, the most ancient part of the Avesta, which can hardly be older than 800 B.C., is linguistically very close to the Rigveda: it is therefore unreasonable to assume that the Indians separated from the Iranians more than 500 years earlier, or about 1300 В.С.

When the Indo-Aryans entered the north-west of India, they brought with them a religion in which the gods were mostly personified powers of nature. A few of these, such as Dyaus, "Heaven," and Usas, "Dawn," come down from Indo-European times; others, such as Mitra, Varuna, and Indra, from the Indo-Iranian age; while yet others were the creation of Aryans on Indian soil. They also brought with them the cult of fire and of Soma, as well as skill in composing religious poems in several metres. The purpose of these ancient hymns was to propitiate the gods by laudations that accompanied offerings of melted butter poured on the sacrificial fire and of the juice of the Soma plant deposited in vessels on the sacrificial grass. The hymns which have been preserved in the Rigveda from the early period of the Indo-Aryan invasion, were almost exclusively composed by a hereditary priesthood. They were handed down in different families memory, not by writing, which can hardly have been introduced into India before 700 B.C. These family groups of hymns were gradually brought together till, with successive additions, they assumed the earliest collected form of the Rigveda. Then followed, about 600 B.C., the constitution of the Samhita text, which did not in any way alter the wording of the collected hymns, but only subjected the text to certain euphonic rules prevalent at that time, by which vowels are either contracted or changed into semivowels, and the vowel a is often dropped, so that the metre is constantly obscured. Soon after this work was completed, extraordinary precautions were taken to preserve from corruption or loss the sacred text thus fixed. The earliest expedient of this kind was the Pada or "word text, in which all the words of the Samhita text are separated and given in their original form, unaffected by euphonic rules, and in which most compounds, as well as some derivatives and inflected forms, are analysed. This text, virtually the earliest commentary on the Rigveda, was followed by other and more complex methods of reciting the text, and by various Indexes, which enumerate the initial words of every hymn, stating the number of stanzas in each hymn, their deities and their metres, for the entire Rigveda. By these means the text of the Rigveda has been handed down for 2,500 years with a fidelity that is unparalleled any other literature.