Atharvaveda

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The Atharvaveda is the fourth of the Vedas, the foundational scriptures of ancient India, and the last of them to be accepted as canonical. Where the Rigveda gathers hymns of praise to the gods, the Samaveda their melodies, and the Yajurveda the formulas of public sacrifice, the Atharvaveda preserves something closer to the ground: charms to cure fever and jaundice, spells to keep off demons and rivals, incantations for love, for safe childbirth, for a king’s victory, and curses meant to ruin an enemy. The name is traditionally tied to the Atharvans, a priestly line associated with fire and ritual formula.

Its contents are commonly sorted into two strains. One is the magical and domestic material — the bhaiṣajyāni, healing charms, and the ābhicārikāni, the hostile spells — verse meant to be spoken over a sick body, a field, a threshold, an amulet. The other is a smaller body of speculative hymns that reach toward cosmology and the ground of being, asking after the frame on which the world is stretched. The collection survives in two recensions, the Shaunaka and the Paippalada, which differ in arrangement and in some of the text itself; the Shaunaka has long been the better known in the West, largely through the nineteenth-century scholarship that edited and translated it.

Within the later Indian tradition its standing was never quite settled. Some authorities counted only three Vedas, the trayī vidyā, and the Atharvaveda’s preoccupation with sorcery and personal advantage sat uneasily beside the solemn public sacrifice of the other three; in time it was firmly admitted as the fourth, and was held by its own school to be the Veda proper to the chief priest who oversaw the whole rite. Three of the principal Upanishads are attached to it, so that the same corpus that opens with a charm against worms runs on, in its later strata, into metaphysics.

For Western esotericism the text has held a particular fascination, since it is the nearest thing the Vedic record offers to a manual of practical magic — words made to act directly on the body and the world. That description is the modern reader’s, and it can mislead: what the tradition transmitted was sacred speech, indistinct from prayer, not a separate craft of “magic” set against religion. The line later drawn between the two is not one the text knew. What it preserves, with unusual frankness, is the everyday register of an ancient ritual world — the fears it answered and the hopes it carried, set down in the same breath as its hymns on the order of all things.

→ In the library: The Upanishads (Müller, 1884) — later Vedic scripture

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