The Vedic Gods: Indra, Agni, and the world of the Rigveda

Open the oldest book in the living world of Hinduism, turn to the very first line, and the first word you meet is the name of a god.

The god is Agni. Fire. The book is the Rigveda, a collection of more than a thousand hymns in an archaic Sanskrit, composed by families of poet-priests somewhere in the northwest of the subcontinent, roughly between 1500 and 1200 before the Common Era. It is the foundation stone of the entire tradition. And the god it opens with, the god whose name is the first sound of the Vedas, is a god almost no Hindu prays to by name today.

That is the strange fact this article is built around. The gods at the dead centre of the oldest scripture are not the gods at the centre of the temples. Walk into a working temple anywhere in India now and you will find Vishnu, or Shiva, or the Goddess. You will not find a shrine to Indra. You will not find worshippers singing to Varuna. The pantheon inverted. The question is how, and why.

The first word

The Rigveda opens on Agni because Agni is where everything begins. He is the fire on the altar, kindled at dawn, and he is the mouth of the gods. Every offering poured into the flame, the clarified butter, the pressed juice, the grain, is carried by him upward to the deities who do not descend to eat in person. He is the hotar, the invoker, and the purohita, the one placed in front, the household priest of the sacrifice. He stands between two worlds and belongs fully to neither.

This is the key to the whole system, and it is worth saying slowly. The old Vedic religion was not built on temples or images. It was built on yajna, the fire-sacrifice: a precise ritual in which gods were invited to a fire and fed, so that they would return blessings, cattle, sons, rain, victory. Agni is the indispensable functionary of that exchange. No fire, no sacrifice. No sacrifice, no contact with the gods at all.

So the most-invoked deity of the Rigveda after Indra is fire itself. The nineteenth-century Sanskritist A.A. Macdonell, in his still-standard survey Vedic Mythology (1897), counted more than two hundred hymns addressed to Agni. He is everywhere in the text because he is the mechanism of the text’s entire purpose.

Hold onto the fire. We will come back to it at the end, still burning.

The god who slays the dragon

If Agni is the priest, Indra is the king.

More hymns of the Rigveda are addressed to Indra than to any other god, somewhere near a quarter of the whole collection. He is the warrior, the drinker, the boisterous champion of the Vedic people. He is enormous, golden, armed with the vajra, the thunderbolt. And his central deed, told and retold across the hymns, is a killing.

The demon is Vritra, whose name means “the obstructor,” a serpent or dragon coiled around the mountains, holding back the waters of the world. The cosmos is choked. Nothing flows. Indra drinks the sacred soma, swells with its force, takes up the thunderbolt forged for him, and strikes. The dragon breaks. The waters rush free. The great hymn of this deed is Rigveda 1.32, and in H.H. Wilson’s careful nineteenth-century rendering Indra “slew the first-born of the dragons,” and the pent rivers ran to the sea like lowing cattle to their calves. The world begins to move again because a god committed an act of violence on behalf of order.

This is worship of a very direct kind. Indra is asked for the things a herding, contending, early people wanted: rain in the dry season, strength in the raid, the breaking of whatever stands in the way. He is not remote and he is not particularly moral. He drinks to excess, he boasts, he can be bought with praise and soma. That immediacy was his power in the Rigveda, and, later, his weakness.

Because Indra fell. In the epics and the Puranas, the vast narrative literature composed many centuries after the Veda, the king of the gods is steadily demoted. He becomes a figure of pride to be humbled, a god who loses his nerve, a cautionary example. The stories that most damage him, his seduction of Ahalya and the curse that follows, are epic and Puranic inventions, and they have no basis in the Rigveda itself. The Vedic Indra is a hero. The later Indra is a warning. The tradition kept the name and turned the meaning inside out.

The one who watches

Set beside Indra stands a wholly different kind of god, and to a modern reader he may be the most surprising figure in the Rigveda.

Varuna is the sovereign of order. Where Indra acts, Varuna watches. He is the guardian of rita, the deep cosmic and moral order that keeps the sun on its track, the seasons in their round, and human conduct in its bounds. He sees everything. The hymns describe his spies moving through the world, and nothing done in secret escapes him. He binds wrongdoers with his pasha, his noose. He is the nearest thing the Rigveda has to a god of conscience, a god before whom one feels guilt.

The evidence for this is one of the most extraordinary passages in the whole book. Rigveda 7.86 is a hymn of a man who knows the god is angry with him and cannot work out what he has done. It is here, in the ancient text, in Griffith’s public-domain translation:

With mine own heart I commune on the question how Varuna and I may be united. What gift of mine will he accept unangered? When may I calmly look and find him gracious?

Fain to know this is my sin I question others: I seek the wise, O Varuna, and ask them. This one same answer even the sages gave me, “Surely this Varuna is angry with thee.”

The hymn goes on to name the ways a person is led astray, and it does so with a plainness that has no equal in the collection:

Not our own will betrayed us, but seduction, thoughtlessness, Varuna wine, dice, or anger. The old is near to lead astray the younger: even sleep removeth not all evil-doing.

This is a religious sensibility that feels almost startlingly personal for a text this old. And this god, this moral sovereign who reads the human heart, is the very god who fades most completely. By the classical period Varuna has shrunk into a god of the waters, a lord of the sea and the western direction, a figure of the ritual manuals rather than of the living devotion of millions. The keeper of cosmic order became a marine deity. If you want to trace the idea of rita forward into what the tradition later called dharma, that thread runs through the article on rita, the cosmic order.

The drink that was a god

There is a ninth book of the Rigveda, and almost all of it praises a single thing that is a plant, a drink, and a god at once.

Soma is pressed from a plant, filtered through wool, mixed with milk, and drunk by priests and, in the hymns, by the gods. It exhilarates. It is the fuel of Indra’s great deeds and the delight of the whole pantheon. And it is deified: the pressed juice is addressed as a god who rushes, roars, and clarifies. The entire Mandala 9, more than a hundred hymns, is soma-hymns, sung as the juice runs through the filter.

What plant was it? Here the honest answer is that we do not know, and we should not pretend otherwise. The identity of the original soma plant was already uncertain within later Indian tradition, which substituted other plants when the original could not be found. Modern scholars have proposed candidate after candidate for more than a century. Each proposal has its defenders and its critics. None has closed the case. The plant at the chemical heart of the oldest Hindu ritual is a genuine mystery, and it is more honest to leave it standing open than to crown a winner.

A sky full of gods

Around these great figures the Rigveda is crowded with others, and a few must be named.

Ushas, the dawn, is the loveliest presence in the book, a young woman who opens the doors of the sky each morning, praised in some of the most beautiful hymns the Vedic poets composed. The twin Ashvins ride ahead of her, horsemen and physicians, rescuers of the shipwrecked and the aged. Surya is the sun in the sky, an eye and a wheel. Vayu is the wind, first to taste the soma. Yama is the first mortal to die and so the lord of the dead who found the path others would follow. Mitra, “contract” or “friend,” stands beside Varuna as a paired sovereign of the day-lit, benevolent side of order.

Then there are the collectives. The Maruts are a troop of storm-gods, young, armed, thundering, the companions of Indra in the fight. The Adityas are a group of sovereign gods, the sons of Aditi, “the boundless,” among whom Varuna and Mitra are chief. The Vedic sky is not a tidy hierarchy. It is a busy, overlapping community of powers, and the many streams that flow out of it are surveyed in the article on the streams of Hinduism.

And here is a detail that pays off enormously later. Vishnu appears in the Rigveda, but as a minor god, famous chiefly for three great strides with which he measures out the worlds. Rudra, an outer and dangerous deity of the wild places, healer and destroyer both, stands at the edge of the pantheon. From that edge Rudra would grow, across a thousand years, into the immense figure of Shiva. That transformation is its own long story, told in the article on what Shaivism is. The point for now is only this: the god who would one day fill temples across a subcontinent begins here as a figure kept carefully at arm’s length.

The One and the many

There is a puzzle in how the Vedic poets praise their gods, and Max Muller, the Victorian scholar who edited the Rigveda’s text, gave it a name.

When a poet sings to Agni, Agni is, for the length of that hymn, the supreme god, the greatest, the source of all. When the same poet turns to Indra, Indra becomes supreme in his turn. Each god, praised, swells to fill the whole sky. Muller called this henotheism, and sometimes kathenotheism, “one god at a time”: the worship of each deity in turn as if it were the only one. It is neither simple polytheism, a fixed committee of ranked gods, nor monotheism, one god alone. It is something more fluid, and Indian thinkers from Radhakrishnan onward have read it as a mind already straining, within the many, toward a One.

The Rigveda gives that straining a line of its own, and it is the single most quoted line in all of Vedic literature. It sits in a dense, riddling hymn, Rigveda 1.164, in Griffith’s translation:

They call him Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni, and he is heavenly nobly-winged Garutman. To what is One, sages give many a title they call it Agni, Yama, Matarisvan.

The Sanskrit of the second half is ekam sad vipra bahudha vadanti: the wise speak of the One Being in many ways. Two things must be held apart here, in separate hands. The line is genuinely in the Veda, in this hymn, saying this. That is the first thing. The second is that this half-verse has had a very long later life as a slogan of religious unity, the tradition’s own famous answer to the many gods, cited for centuries to mean that all paths climb one mountain. Both are real. The verse is ancient, and its use as a banner of unity is a real and old interpretive tradition. This article records both and adjudicates neither. Where the tradition reads a doctrine into a line, that reading is part of the record too, and it is a separate lane from the line itself.

Where they came from

One question sits underneath all of this, and it must be handled with care, because it is contested and it has been made to carry political weight it was never designed to bear.

Where did the people who composed these hymns, and the gods they sang to, come from? The Vedic language belongs to the Indo-European family, kin to Old Persian, Greek, and Latin, and some of its gods have cousins across that family. The strongest recent evidence comes from ancient DNA. The 2019 study led by Vagheesh Narasimhan and published in Science found a pulse of ancestry from the Central Asian steppe entering the northwest of the subcontinent in the second millennium before the Common Era, which the authors connect to the spread of Indo-Aryan languages and, with them, the world of the Rigveda. That is the data, and the interpretive step is theirs, named.

It is not the only reading. A partner study led by Vasant Shinde in Cell, also 2019, sequenced an individual from the Harappan city of Rakhigarhi and found no steppe ancestry at all, which its authors read as complicating any simple story of arrival. The full argument, the evidence on every side, and the reasons the word “invasion” is the wrong word for a process that looks like gradual movement and mixture, are laid out in the article on the Aryan migration debate. This article hands the argument there and takes no side in it. What matters for the gods is only that the Rigveda records a particular people at a particular moment, and their religion was already old when they sang it.

From the fire to the flower

So why did the pantheon invert? Why did Agni and Indra and Varuna recede, and Vishnu and Shiva and the Goddess rise?

The short answer is that the mode of religion changed. The Vedic gods were bound to the sacrifice. You reached them through yajna, the fire, the offering, the precisely chanted formula, mediated by priests who alone knew the ritual. That is a religion of transaction and of expertise. It is powerful, and it is also distant. You do not fall in love with a mechanism.

Over the following thousand years, and with gathering force in the medieval centuries, the centre of Hindu religious life moved toward bhakti, personal, passionate devotion to a God one could love and be loved by, and toward puja, worship offered before a consecrated image in a temple. This is a religion of relationship. Its history is told in the article on the bhakti movement. And in a religion of relationship, the gods who could be persons, who had faces and stories and could be adored, rose to the top. Vishnu descends into the world as Rama and Krishna and can be loved. Shiva is a husband and an ascetic and a dancer. The Goddess is a mother and a warrior. You can give your heart to these.

Indra, king of a fading sacrifice, had nothing to give the heart. He receded. This is one of the deepest currents in the whole story of Sanatana Dharma: the tradition did not discard its oldest gods so much as it moved its love elsewhere, and left them standing in the ritual books, honoured and unvisited.

The fire that never went out

And yet.

Go to a Hindu wedding today, anywhere in the world, and the couple will walk around a fire. The seven steps, the vows, the whole binding of two lives, are witnessed by Agni, exactly as the Rigveda ordained, the same god whose name opens the oldest book. Go to a cremation ground, and it is Agni again who receives the body and carries it onward. The Gayatri mantra, among the most sacred verses a Hindu can recite, is a Rigvedic verse addressed to the light of the sun. The god of that verse is Vedic. The person chanting it, this morning, is alive.

The great gods of the Rigveda left the temples. They did not leave the fire.

Turn to the first line of the oldest book, and read the first word again. It is still burning.