Sky in the Rigveda, and the temptation to over-read it, the gist

Sky in the Rigveda, and the temptation to over-read it

India's oldest book of hymns does contain some real sky, but it is a small amount, and for six hundred years readers have been finding much more in it than is actually written there.

This is the short way in. The essay has the working, the sources and the sky.

One famous hymn asks you to name a wheel with twelve spokes and 720 sons standing on it in pairs. Twelve months, 360 days, 360 nights. Neat. Then the same hymn gives you a wheel with five spokes, and a chariot with seven wheels, and a wheel with 360 pegs in it. It was never trying to give you one answer.

The Rigveda is a collection of about a thousand hymns in Sanskrit, put together in the second half of the second millennium BCE. It is a book of praise and ritual, not a book about the sky. But it was written by people who lived outdoors, so the sky is in it.

Here is roughly everything the sky-content amounts to. A year of twelve months. The knowledge that twelve moon-months do not match the seasons, so an extra month is sometimes needed. Dawn, the sun's daily path, the moon filling and emptying. One passage where the sun is covered by darkness and a sage restores it, which sounds like a memory of an eclipse. And two star names, both in a wedding hymn.

That is the whole list. There is no list of the twenty-seven star-stations. There are no planets as a group. There are no zodiac signs, no birth charts, no readings about anyone's life.

Now the second part. Readers keep adding. A famous commentator in the fourteenth century explained the twelve-spoked wheel as the twelve zodiac signs, even though signs reached India long after the hymn was made. In the 1890s Bal Gangadhar Tilak and a German scholar named Hermann Jacobi went much further. Because the stars slowly shift against the seasons, they argued you could work backwards from Vedic statements about stars and get a date: around 4500 BCE.

Other scholars at the time, including W. D. Whitney, said the evidence was too thin. It still is. To get a date like that you must assume which star is meant, which event is meant, and that the poet was recording a real observation rather than repeating an old habit. Being wrong about any one of those moves the answer by about a thousand years.

Words decoded

Rigveda (ऋग्वेद): the oldest surviving collection of Sanskrit hymns, roughly a thousand of them, arranged in ten books
hymn 1.164: a famous poem of fifty-two verses in the first book, full of riddles about time and the sun
brahmodya (ब्रह्मोद्य): a ritual riddle contest, where priests asked each other hard questions about the world
nakshatra (नक्षत्र): later, one of twenty-seven divisions of the sky; in the Rigveda the word mostly just means "star"
rashi (राशि): a zodiac sign, one of twelve. These are not in the Rigveda at all
precession: the very slow drift of the seasons against the background stars, about one degree every seventy-odd years
eclipse: the sun or moon being blocked from view, by the moon or by the earth's shadow
Sayana: a fourteenth-century scholar who wrote the best-known old commentary on the Rigveda
Tilak and Jacobi: two scholars of the 1890s who tried to date the Rigveda from its sky references, and got about 4500 BCE

Why anyone should careTwo opposite mistakes are easy here. One is to say the old books contain modern science in code, which they do not. The other is to sneer at them, which gets you nothing. The useful habit is in between: read what is written, notice who added what and when, and keep the two apart. That habit works on a three-thousand-year-old hymn and it works just as well on an astrology post you were sent yesterday.

Read it properly, 7 min Sky in the Rigveda, and the temptation to over-read it