The Fire Before Dawn

He is a poet. In his language he is a kavi — a word that means “seer” as much as “maker,” because to him the two are the same thing: to truly see is to be able to say. He kneels by the hearth where last night's fire has banked down to a red eye under grey ash, and he begins to coax it back. Two sticks of dry wood, the araṇi, twirled hard against each other until the friction breathes a thread of smoke, then a spark, then — there — a small living flame standing up in the dark.

And here is the thing you have to understand about this man, three thousand years before you, on a riverbank in the northwest of the subcontinent: when that flame stands up, he does not think I have made fire. He thinks the god has arrived. Fire, to him, is not a chemical reaction. Fire is Agni — a god born new every morning out of the wood, ancient and newborn at once, the most intimate of all the gods because he lives in every hearth. And Agni is the mouth: the one who takes the butter and grain poured into the flames and carries it up as smoke to the gods who live too high to reach. Fire is the road between earth and heaven, and it runs both ways.

So when the poet opens his mouth, the first word out of it is the god's own name. And it is not a coincidence that this is also, quite literally, the first word of the entire Rigveda — agním — the word the priests who assembled the whole vast collection chose, out of all possible words, to place at the very beginning, so that for three thousand years every reciter's first utterance would be fire:

Rigveda 1.1.1

agním īḷe puróhitaṃ yajñásya devám ṛtvíjam

· ◉ ·

I praise Agni — the priest set at the front of the rite, the god, the one who offers at the right season.

Listen to what he does in one breath. He calls Agni a priest — because the fire is the one who actually performs the sacrifice. He calls him a god. He calls him ṛtvíj, the one who knows the proper season for things. Before the verse is done he will call him the summoner who calls the other gods to come, and “the greatest giver of treasure.” Five names for one flame, because the flame is all of these at once: the servant who carries the message, the divine guest at the door, and the patron who pays you back in wealth. The whole two-way traffic between the human and the divine is folded into the first thing he says before the sun is up.

He feeds the fire. It grows. And as it grows, the sky behind him, almost imperceptibly, begins to change.

Here is where you would expect the poetry to be dutiful. It is not. Because the next thing that happens — the sky greying, then pinking, then catching fire at the rim of the world — is, to this man, the return of someone he loves. Her name is Uṣas, the Dawn, a goddess imagined as a young woman, radiant, unveiling herself, throwing open the doors of the sky. The hymns to her are, by wide agreement, the most beautiful poetry in the whole Rigveda, and what makes them beautiful is that there is nothing dutiful in them at all. The poet is genuinely moved. He watches her come the way you might watch someone you have missed walk back into a room.

She is, he sings, like a dancer putting on her finery; like a woman rising from her bath; she comes revealing her light, driving the darkness back, waking every creature that sleeps, setting the birds to flight and the people to their work. She is eternally young — she has done this every morning since the beginning of the world and will do it forever — and yet, here the poetry turns and catches in the throat, she wears out the lives of mortals even as she returns unaged.

Every dawn she is new; every dawn the watcher is one day older. She is faithful and she is merciless at once — and the comings-back are the very thing that measures a human life down to its end.

— the hymns to Uṣas

That is the Rigveda showing you, in its first hour, that it is not a primitive book. A people who can look at a sunrise and feel in the same instant delight and the ache of their own mortality are not children. They are us. The poet pours an offering into the fire for her. The flames leap. The light spreads. And the household begins to stir behind him.

Now the sun itself clears the trees, and the poet does something every devout person in his tradition will do at this exact hour for the next three thousand years — something millions of people are still doing, this morning, as you read this. He faces the light, and he prays not for cattle, not for victory, not for sons or rain or a long life — all the things the hymns usually ask for. He asks for one thing only, and it is the strangest and most beautiful request in the whole book. He asks for his mind to be switched on.

He addresses the sun not as the disc in the sky but as Savitṛ — “the Impeller,” the sun understood as the divine force that sets things moving, that pushes the world out of sleep and into motion each day. And he says:

The Gāyatrī · Rigveda 3.62.10

tát savitúr váreṇyaṃ bhárgo devásya dhīmahi — dhíyo yó naḥ pracodáyāt

· ◉ ·

May we hold in our thought that most excellent radiance of the divine Impeller — he who might set our thoughts in motion.

You will know this verse, or know of it, even if you have never heard its name. Across three millennia the Gāyatrī became, very possibly, the single most-recited line of Sanskrit ever spoken by human beings. And consider what it actually wants. The key word is the last one, pracodáyāt — “may he impel, may he quicken, may he drive forward” — and what he wants quickened is dhíyaḥ, his thoughts, his insight, the inner light of the mind itself. Of all the things a Bronze Age civilization could have placed at the dead center of its daily devotion, it chose a prayer that the divine light would kindle human thinking. Not “make me rich.” Make me see.

It is, when you sit with it, the same gesture as the fire at dawn. Agni is the light that climbs from the wood; Savitṛ is the light that climbs over the horizon; and the prayer is that some of that same kindling would happen inside the skull — that the mind would catch like tinder. The whole sensibility of these people runs on that one metaphor: light arriving in darkness, outside and in.

By midday the sun is high and hard, and the talk around the fire turns, as it so often does, to the god they love above all others — not the gentle dawn or the inward sun, but the wild one. Indra. Roughly a quarter of all the thousand-plus hymns are his, and he is nobody's idea of a saint. He drinks. He boasts. He is enormous and unpredictable and a little frightening, a god made plainly in the image of the warrior-chiefs who sang to him — and the people adore him for it, the way people have always adored a champion who is larger and rowdier than themselves.

And the story they tell about Indra, more than any other — the beating mythic heart of the entire Rigveda — is the story of the day he killed the dragon. There was a serpent, Vṛtra, whose name means something like “the obstruction,” “the one who holds back.” He had coiled himself around the mountains and he was withholding the waters — all the rivers, all the rain, all the flowing life of the world, locked up inside him, and the earth dying of thirst beneath. And Indra, swollen with Soma until he felt as vast as the sky, took up his thunderbolt, the vajra, and went to break the world open. The poet who tells it best steps forward like a performer taking the stage:

Rigveda 1.32

índrasya nú vīryā̀ṇi prá vocam

· ◉ ·

Now I shall proclaim the heroic deeds of Indra —

Rigveda 1.32 · four hammer-blows

áhann áhim · ánv apás tatarda · prá vakṣáṇā abhinat párvatānām

· ◉ ·

He slew the serpent. He bored through to the waters. He split open the bellies of the mountains.

Read it on its first level and it is a thunderstorm: the monsoon bolt cracks the heaped cloud-mountains, the dragon of drought is split, and the waters come roaring down at last into a parched land. Read it deeper and it is the oldest drama there is — order breaking the grip of chaos, motion defeating stagnation, life forcing its way out of what would hoard it. Indra is the principle that keeps the universe from seizing up.

In the afternoon they press the Soma. This is the strange green-gold heart of the ritual. They take the stalks of a plant — and we will come to the mystery of which plant in a moment — and crush them between stones, and the juice runs out and is strained through a fleece of sheep's wool and mixed with milk or water, and the priests drink it. And something happens to them. Something the hymns describe with a soaring, almost vertiginous joy:

Rigveda 9.113

ápāma sómam amṛ́tā abhūma · áganma jyótir · ávidāma devā́n

· ◉ ·

We have drunk the Soma; we have become immortal; we have come to the light; we have found the gods.

An entire one of the ten books of the Rigveda is given over almost wholly to this drink. The drinker feels lifted clean out of his mortal skin — expanded, luminous, briefly deathless. There is even a wild hymn spoken in the first person as Indra himself, drunk on the stuff, marveling at his own cosmic hugeness: the five tribes are nothing to me — have I not drunk the Soma? — the two worlds do not equal one half of me.

And the secret at the center of it: we do not know what Soma was. The plant is lost. The best sober guess is ephedra, a stimulant shrub still used in ritual to this day by the Zoroastrian Parsis — whose scripture, remarkably, knows the very same sacred drink under the cousin-name Haoma, which tells us the cult is older than the split between the Indian and Iranian peoples. Others have argued for the fly-agaric mushroom, for psychedelics, for cannabis, for the blue lotus. Part of why the trail went cold is that the Vedic people themselves seem to have lost the original as they migrated — they openly used substitutes, so “Soma” may already have been several plants by the end of the Vedic age. One of humanity's oldest sacred intoxicants slipped out of memory thousands of years ago, leaving behind only the hymns that praise the feeling it gave.

The fire burns lower. The light goes long and golden. The big questions, which the bright hard hours of the day held off, begin to come on with the dusk.

Here is something that should, by rights, not fit inside a religion of so many gods — and yet here it is, sitting quietly in the oldest book, waiting for the evening when someone is thoughtful enough to notice it. All day the poet has praised separate gods — Agni, Uṣas, Savitṛ, Indra, Soma — and praised each as if that one were supreme, the highest, the source of all. (Scholars call this habit henotheism: the worship of one god at a time as though he were the only one.) But in one of the dense riddle-hymns there comes a moment where a poet steps all the way back from the crowded sky full of names and says the quiet, enormous thing:

Rigveda 1.164.46

ékaṃ sád víprā bahudhā́ vadanti

· ◉ ·

The Real is One; the wise speak of it in many ways. — Truth is one; the sages call it by many names.

They call it Indra, the verse goes on, and Mitra, and Varuṇa, and Agni — but behind all the names there is a single that-which-is, one Reality, and the gods are only the many faces the inspired give it. Stop and feel how strange and how early this is. In the middle of what looks from the outside like raw polytheism, a poet three thousand years ago reaches behind the whole pantheon and touches one thing.

This half-line became the seed of an entire civilization's thought — the root of Hindu pluralism, of the idea that many paths climb one mountain, of the great philosophical monism that would flower centuries later in the Upaniṣads. When, much later, people would argue that all religions point toward the same truth, they were echoing twelve syllables a Vedic poet murmured at dusk. It is arguably the most consequential dozen syllables in the history of Indian thought — and it is hiding inside a riddle.

Not every verse in the Rigveda is a glory, and an honest telling has to slow down here, in the gathering dark, for one that became heavier than its makers can have known. Late in the life of the Rigveda — and this matters, so hold onto it — there was composed a grand, strange hymn about a cosmic giant, the Puruṣa, a primal Person with a thousand heads and a thousand feet, whom the gods sacrifice and from whose dismembered body they assemble the entire universe: the moon from his mind, the sun from his eye, the sky from his head, the earth from his feet. And in the middle of it comes the single verse that would shape Indian society for three thousand years:

The Puruṣa Sūkta · Rigveda 10.90.12

brāhmaṇó 'sya múkham āsīd · bāhū́ rājanyáḥ kṛtáḥ · ūrū́ tád asya yád vaíśyaḥ · padbhyā́ṃ śūdró ajāyata

· ◉ ·

His mouth became the priest; his arms were made the warrior; his thighs became the commoner; from his feet the servant was born.

There it is: the four social classes, the varṇas, ranked by the body part they spring from. This one verse became the scriptural cornerstone of the caste system, used for millennia to justify a rigid order of birth. But honesty requires three facts that cut hard against treating it as the eternal foundation of anything.

So the truthful shape of it is this: rigid caste is not what the Rigveda is built on. It is something that hardened near the very end, and got a piece of cosmic poetry written to bless it after the fact. That distinction has mattered enormously in the modern world, and it deserves to be said out loud beside the verse, not folded away.

And now it is night, real night, the fire down to coals again, the stars out in their thousands, and the poet — or some poet, in the late evening of this whole tradition, when the praising was largely done and the wondering had begun — looks up into all that black depth and asks the only question that finally matters. Where did all of this come from? What he says next is, to my mind, the single most astonishing thing in the entire Rigveda. He does not answer with a god. He does not answer with a story. He begins by clearing the board completely:

The Creation Hymn · Rigveda 10.129

nā́sad āsīn nó sád āsīt tadā́nīm

· ◉ ·

There was neither non-being nor being then.

No non-existence, and no existence either. No air, he goes on, no sky beyond it. No death — and no immortality. No night, no day, no sign to tell one from the other. He empties the universe of every distinction we use to think with. And then, into that absolute emptiness, he sets one image so quiet and so impossible that it has haunted readers for thousands of years:

Rigveda 10.129

ā́nīd avātáṃ svadháyā tád ékam

· ◉ ·

That One breathed — windless — by its own power.

Breathing is the sign of life. But breathing needs air, and there was no air. So the one thing that was did the impossible: it lived without the conditions of life, breathing without breath, by its own power alone — svadhayā, out of nothing but itself. And notice the word at the center: tád ékam, “That One” — the very same One we touched at dusk in ékaṃ sat. The whole book is quietly converging, in its last and darkest hour, on one thing. And then comes the part that makes grown philosophers go still. Having brought us to the brink of the origin of everything, the poet does not plant a flag of certainty:

Who really knows? Who here can say where it came from? The gods themselves came after the world was made — so who knows from what it arose? The one who watches from the highest heaven — only he knows. Or perhaps even he does not know.

— the most famous shrug in religious history

A sacred text, facing the largest question there is, choosing — three thousand years ago — wonder over dogma, honesty over reassurance, the open hand over the closed fist. This is why the hymn is loved far past the borders of Hinduism; why Carl Sagan reached for it when he wanted to praise a tradition of skeptical questioning and unselfconscious humility before the great cosmic mysteries. The Rigveda's final word on the biggest thing of all is not an answer. It is a question, held open, in the dark.

There is one more verse to hear before the coals go grey, and it is the right one to end on, because in it the Rigveda turns and looks at itself. Among the hymns is one spoken entirely in the first person by a goddess — and not just any goddess, but Vāc, “Speech” herself, the Word, the very thing all these poets have been working in all day long. And the tradition holds — this is part of its wonder — that the hymn was composed by a woman, the seer Vāc Āmbhṛṇī. In a text this old, a woman's voice speaks as the divine, and what she says is breathtaking in its boldness. She does not say she serves the gods. She says she carries them:

The Devī Sūkta · Rigveda 10.125

aháṃ rudrébhir vásubhiś carāmi… ahám mitrā́váruṇobhā́ bibharmi · ahám indrāgnī́…

· ◉ ·

I move with the Rudras and the Vasus… I uphold both Mitra and Varuṇa; I bear Indra and Agni…

I. I. I. The word ahám — “I” — falls again and again like a drumbeat. Every great god we have met across this whole day — Indra the dragon-slayer, Agni the fire at the door, Varuṇa the watcher — she declares that she bears them up, sustains them, carries them through the world. The gods do not command Speech; Speech holds the gods aloft. Without the sacred word, the hymn, the naming, the gods have no vehicle in the world at all. (You can hear, very far off, a later scripture's “In the beginning was the Word.”) And she goes further, to the edge of pure power:

Rigveda 10.125

yáṃ kāmáye táṃ-tam ugráṃ kṛṇomi · tám brahmā́ṇaṃ tám ṛ́ṣiṃ táṃ sumedhā́m

· ◉ ·

Whomever I love, I make mighty — I make him a knower of the sacred, a seer, a sage of deep wisdom.

She is the source of human greatness itself. The poet who shaped the dawn hymn, the sage who touched That One in the dark — their power was never merely their own. It was Speech, moving through them. Which means this final hymn is the Rigveda becoming aware of itself: a poem about the divinity of the word, composed in that very word, declaring that the word is what makes seers out of mortals. It is the fire looking back down the road it has been carrying messages along all day, and recognizing that the road, too, was a god.

The coals are grey now. The poet banks the fire so that one red eye will survive the night and be there to coax back into a god before tomorrow's dawn — because that is the unbroken thing, the fire passed forward, day after day, that this whole civilization is built around.

And that, in the end, is what the Rigveda is. Not a book — there was no book; for most of its three thousand years it was never written down at all, on purpose, because the holiness was held to live in the sound. It was carried in human memory, mouth to ear, by reciters who turned their own voices into something very like an error-proof machine, repeating the verses forward and backward and braided together so that no syllable could ever quietly drift. It comes down to us cleaner than texts that were written. It is, by a fair measure, the most accurately transmitted thing our species has ever made — and it was made of breath.

Walk back through the single day we just spent. The fire that is a god arriving. The dawn you love who is also counting down your life. The prayer that asks only that your mind be lit. The wild champion splitting the dragon to free the waters, in a sentence older than Sanskrit. The lost green drink that made men feel deathless. The dusk-thought that all the many gods are one. The hard, late verse that blessed a hierarchy the older hymns never knew. The night-question brave enough to end in perhaps no one knows. And the Word herself, at the last, declaring that she is the power behind every voice that ever sang any of it.

This is not a relic under glass. It is the oldest thing humanity still actively says out loud — and the fire the first poet lit on that riverbank, before history began, is still, impossibly, faithfully, being carried forward into one more day.

— the fire before dawn