The Four Fires

The first word of the Rigveda, as the tradition has arranged it, is agnim. Fire.

Not a god of fire standing somewhere above the world. The fire itself, on the altar, in the accusative case, as the direct object of an act of praise. The opening hymn does not describe Agni. It addresses him. Before any doctrine, before any philosophy, before the word Veda meant a body of scripture to be defended, there was a man at dawn with a fire in front of him, speaking to it.

We do not have his name. We have his words.

What we call “the Vedas” is, in physical fact, four collections. The Sanskrit term is Samhita, “that which is put together,” a gathering of verses fixed in a settled order. Four Samhitas, four bodies of sound, each assembled for a different reason and a different voice in the rite. The previous chapter asked how a wholly oral corpus survived without a library. This chapter opens the corpus and asks the next question. What is actually inside. And why four.

The book of praise

The Rigveda is the eldest and the largest of the four. Its name joins rik, a verse of praise, with veda, knowledge. The collection runs to 1,028 hymns, called sukta, “well-spoken,” organized into ten books, each book a mandala, “circle” or “cycle.” The count is not in dispute; the standard numbering of ten mandalas and 1,028 suktas is the one Max Müller fixed in his nineteenth-century edition and the one the tradition itself transmits.

Books two through seven are the oldest stratum, the so-called “family books,” each ascribed by tradition to a particular clan of seers, the rishis. The first and tenth mandalas are generally held by scholarship to be later additions, and the tenth contains some of the most philosophically restless material in the entire corpus. We will return to it.

The hymns are addressed to gods. Not many gods organized into a tidy hierarchy. A crowd of powers, overlapping, sometimes contradicting, each praised in turn as if, for the length of the hymn, he were the highest. Agni, the fire, who carries the offering up to the gods and is therefore the priest among them. Indra, the warrior who splits the demon Vritra and releases the held waters, the most-invoked of all. Soma, at once a plant, a pressed juice, and the god of that juice, to whom the whole ninth mandala is given. Varuna, who watches over rita, the cosmic order, and binds the liar. Ushas, the dawn, to whom some of the oldest surviving poetry in any Indo-European language is addressed.

Hear how the collection opens. This is the first hymn, to Agni, in the public-domain translation of Ralph Griffith from 1896.

I Laud Agni, the chosen Priest, God, minister of sacrifice, The hotar, lavishest of wealth. Worthy is Agni to be praised by living as by ancient seers. He shall bring hitherward the Gods.

Read it slowly. The hotar is the priest who recites the invocations and pours the offering. The hymn calls Agni the hotar of the gods, the one who does for heaven what the human priest does on earth. And the second verse already carries the anxiety that will run through this whole investigation. Agni is worthy of praise “by living as by ancient seers.” The poet, in the act of composing, is conscious that he stands in a line. There were rishis before him. He is repeating, and adding to, something already old.

The hymn ends on a note that has almost nothing of the cosmic about it.

Be to us easy of approach, even as a father to his son: Agni, be with us for our weal.

A father to his son. The grandest power in the rite, asked to be approachable, asked to be near. The Rigveda is full of this. The cosmos is vast and the gods are terrible, and the hymns keep asking them to come close, to sit on the strewn grass, to drink, to listen.

This is the character of the first fire. The Rigveda is the book of the spoken hymn, of invocation, of the named gods called by name to a fire at dawn.

The book of melody

The second collection barely exists on its own terms, and that is the point of it.

The Samaveda takes its name from saman, a melody, a chant. Open it and you find that the great majority of its verses are lifted straight from the Rigveda, chiefly from the eighth and ninth mandalas. Macdonell, in his 1900 history of Sanskrit literature, put the matter plainly: of the Samaveda’s roughly 1,800 verses, only a small number, fewer than a hundred by most counts, are not found in the Rigveda. As a book of words, it is almost entirely a repetition.

So why does it exist.

Because the Samaveda is not a book of words. It is a book of sound. The Rigvedic verse, on the page, is a text. Sung in the saman manner, the same verse is stretched, broken, vowels prolonged, syllables inserted that mean nothing as language and everything as music. A single word can be drawn across many notes. The text of the Samaveda is a score.

The tradition assigns the Samaveda to a specific priest of the great soma sacrifice, the udgatar, the one who sings. Where the hotar recites and the fire receives, the udgatar lifts the verse into melody. The Indian musical tradition has long traced its own origin to these chants. The claim, repeated across later treatises on music, is that the seven notes of the classical scale descend from the cadences of saman singing. We should be careful here. The historical line from Vedic chant to the developed raga system is long and the evidence across it is uneven, and serious historians of Indian music treat the descent as a tradition’s own account of itself rather than a documented chain. What is not in doubt is that the Samaveda is the oldest surviving body of melodic notation on the subcontinent.

The same words, then, in two of the four Vedas. Spoken in one, sung in the other. The corpus is beginning to show its logic. It is organized less by what is said than by who says it, and how.

The book of the formula

The third fire is the most practical, and the most tangled.

The Yajurveda takes its name from yajus, the sacrificial formula. These are, for the most part, short prose utterances, muttered by the priest called the adhvaryu, the one who does the physical work of the rite. He measures the ground, builds the altar, handles the implements, kills the victim where there is one, pours the libation. As his hands move, his mouth supplies the yajus. “I take you for the sake of breath.” “You are the body of Agni.” The formula and the act are bound together. The word does the ritual; the ritual needs the word.

Here the manuscript record forks, and the tradition itself names the fork. There are two great recensions, two transmitted versions, called the Black Yajurveda and the White Yajurveda. Krishna, black, and shukla, white.

The difference is not theological. It is editorial. In the Black Yajurveda, the yajus formulas and the prose explanation of what they do, the commentary the later tradition would gather into the Brahmanas, are mixed together in the same text, formula and gloss interleaved. The tradition called this arrangement “black,” and the standard interpretation, repeated in Macdonell and in Winternitz, reads the word as marking the mixed, unsorted, disordered character of the collection. The White Yajurveda separates them. It holds the formulas clean in the Samhita and pushes the explanatory prose out into its own Brahmana. White for the sorted, the clear.

The Black recension is preserved in several schools, the Taittiriya being the most prominent. The White is preserved in the Vajasaneyi Samhita. The tradition holds that the White recension was revealed afresh to the sage Yajnavalkya, who appears later in this volume as one of the towering figures of the early Upanishads. The historical relationship between the two is debated. What can be said with confidence is that both are old, both are genuine lines of transmission, and the difference between them tells us something the smooth idea of “scripture” hides. The text was edited. Different communities of priests arranged the same inheritance differently, and both arrangements were kept.

This is the third character. The Yajurveda is the book of the working priest, of the muttered word that accompanies the moving hand.

The fourth fire, and the question of three

Now the honest difficulty.

For long stretches of the tradition, there are not four Vedas. There are three.

The phrase is trayi vidya, “the threefold knowledge,” and it appears across the older literature as the natural name for the whole corpus. The triad it names is rik, yajus, saman: verse, formula, melody. The Rigveda, the Yajurveda, the Samaveda. The Chandogya Upanishad speaks of the threefold knowledge that proceeds from the sacred syllable Om (1.1.9). The Brahmanas speak of the threefold Veda as a settled thing. When the early texts want to say “all of sacred knowledge,” they very often say three.

Where, then, is the Atharvaveda.

The fourth collection takes its name from atharvan, an ancient class of fire-priests, and it is a different kind of book. The solemn public sacrifice is only part of its world. Alongside hymns to the gods, the Atharvaveda gathers what the other three largely leave out: charms against fever and against the worm that gnaws the teeth; spells to win a lover, to keep a husband, to harm a rival; blessings for cattle and for the king’s enthronement; incantations for safe childbirth; curses laid on enemies and counter-curses against sorcery. It is the household and the cremation ground as much as the altar. Winternitz, in his history of Indian literature, described it as opening a window onto the daily fears and desires of Vedic people that the loftier collections keep shut.

This is why the canon’s edge is uneven here. The Atharvaveda’s content reaches downward, into magic and medicine and the ordinary terrors of a life, in a way that sat uneasily with priests whose authority rested on the high sacrifice. A number of older sources count only the three. Some later texts that do count four still betray, in their phrasing, that the fourth is an addition. The historical reading, given by Winternitz and by Gonda in his survey of Vedic literature, is that the Atharvaveda achieved recognition as a Veda later than the other three, and that the older threefold count never fully disappeared even after the fourfold count became standard. You can even watch the seam in the same body of text: where the Chandogya does enumerate the corpus at length, it names the Rik, the Yajus, the Saman, “and the Atharvana as the fourth” (7.1.2), counting the fourth in by name as if it still needed announcing.

We should not overstate the exclusion. The Atharvaveda was, in time, fully accepted. It carries its own line of Upanishads, among them the Mundaka and the Mandukya, which the later philosophical tradition treasured. Its priest, the brahman, came to be the silent overseer of the whole sacrifice, the one who watches for error and corrects it. A book that begins on the margin ends as the supervisor’s text.

But the older count is preserved in the language, and a careful account does not paper over it. When you read “the threefold knowledge” in an ancient text, you are reading from a moment when the canon had three doors, not four. When you read “the four Vedas,” you are reading from after the fourth door was cut. Both phrasings are in the corpus. The tradition kept the record of its own widening.

There is a quiet lesson in that. The corpus did not pretend to have always been complete. It let the seam show.

What the four fires are

Step back and the architecture is visible.

The four are not four subjects. They are four offices at one fire. The Rigveda is the hymn the hotar recites. The Samaveda is that hymn lifted into melody by the udgatar. The Yajurveda is the formula the adhvaryu mutters as he works. The Atharvaveda is the wider book, the brahman’s book and the household’s book, the charm and the cure and the late-admitted speculation. Verse, melody, formula, and the rest. The same sacrifice, heard from four positions.

And every one of them, at the root, is addressed to a fire. The first word was agnim, and the fire is what every office is finally for. The offering goes into Agni, and Agni carries it up. The four Vedas are four ways of standing at that one flame.

This chapter has opened the four collections and read what is in them. It has not yet asked what surrounds them. For each Samhita does not stand alone. Wrapped around the hymns are further layers, the prose that explains the rite, the texts composed for the forest, the dialogues that turn from the altar to the Self. The tradition has a name for this architecture, and a logic for its order.

The next chapter goes inward, from the collected verse to the layers built around it, and asks why the corpus is shaped like a journey from the fire to the question of who is watching the fire.

The fire is lit. The next chapter asks what grew around it.