Brihaspati

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Brihaspati (Sanskrit Bṛhaspati) is the Vedic god of sacred speech and the ritual power carried in it — the chaplain of the gods, lord of prayer, and patron of eloquence and the formulated word. His name is most often read as “lord of the bráhman,” the charged sacred utterance that the hymns hold to make the rite effective, and in the oldest layer he shades into a near-double, Brahmanaspati, “lord of the sacred formula.” Where the warrior gods act by force, Brihaspati acts by saying. This is the seam he occupies from first to last: he is a person, and he is a function — the efficacy of the rightly spoken word, given a face, a bow, and a voice.

A devotional image of Brihaspati, the lord of sacred speech who in later tradition lends his name to the planet Jupiter. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Name and the double figure

The two names sit so close that the Rigveda uses them almost interchangeably. Bṛhaspati is most readily parsed as “lord (pati) of the bráhman,” and Brahmaṇaspati as “lord of the brahman” in the same sense — the bráhman here being not the later metaphysical absolute but the older, narrower thing: the holy formula, the swelling, charged utterance that a priest brings to bear on the rite. (The word’s afterlife as the name of ultimate reality belongs to a different stratum of Indian thought and a different referent; the Vedic bráhman of Brihaspati is the spoken instrument, not the ground of being.) Where the hymns address Brihaspati they tend to dwell on the speaker’s standing before the gods; where they address Brahmanaspati they dwell on the formula itself and its work. The standard reading in the scholarship of the Vedic pantheon — Arthur Anthony Macdonell’s Vedic Mythology of 1898 set the terms still used — treats the two as one deity seen from two angles, and treats that deity as a divinization: the power of priestly speech, raised to a god and then narrated as if it had a biography.

He is given a father early. The Rigveda calls him a son of Aṅgiras (RV 4.40.1), which fastens him to the Aṅgirasas, the archetypal family of fire-priests and singers; the epithet Āṅgirasa follows him afterward. The hymns also lend him a fierce, almost martial outline that an abstraction would not need: he is bright and seven-mouthed, born of the first light, and carries a bow whose string is ṛta, the cosmic order — a weapon, but one strung with rightness rather than sinew. The image is exact to the conception. His force is real; it is simply not the kind that other gods wield.

The most-invoked word in the Rigveda

Brihaspati / Brahmanaspati is among the more frequently named figures of the Rigveda, with hymns of his own — the bulk of them in the second and tenth books, RV 2.23 and 2.24 the best-known — and a presence running through hymns addressed to others. The portrait there is consistent. He is the divine purohita, the household priest who stands before the gods as a human priest stands before his patron; he is brahmán among the gods, the one who formulates and intones. And his word is credited with effect in the world, not merely with describing it: it shatters obstacles, finds lost cattle, opens the closed way, drives off the demonic dark. He is invoked alongside Indra as the counsel behind the thunderer’s arm, the sayer behind the striker, and alongside Agni and Soma as part of the apparatus by which the sacrifice reaches its mark. The conviction underwriting all of it is the one that organizes Vedic religion as a whole: that rightly ordered speech, delivered in the exact measure, is not a comment on the world’s order but a means of acting on it.

This is the conception that makes Brihaspati more than a patron of fine language. In the world the hymns assume, the cosmos is held together by ṛta, the right order of things, and the sacrifice is the renewal of that order; the spoken formula, pitched and metered and placed without flaw, is the working edge of the rite. A misplaced syllable can spoil the whole, and a perfect one can compel a result. The god who is “lord of the bráhman” is thus the lord of the most dangerous and most necessary instrument the priests handle — not the hymn as poetry but the hymn as force. The Vedic prose that grows up around the ritual, the Brāhmaṇas, hardens this still further: there the deity who presides over the brahmán-priest’s silent supervision of the rite, the office that watches and corrects so that no error escapes, is bound to the same conception of speech-as-efficacy that Brihaspati embodies. Where other gods are addressed because they give cattle or rain or victory, Brihaspati is addressed because he is the very thing that makes any address work.

The Vala cave: the rock cracked by song

The myth that gathers the god up is the freeing of the cows from the cave of Vala. The cattle — light, wealth, the dawns, the waters, in the layered Vedic reading all at once — lie penned in the rock of Vala, walled away from the world. Brihaspati, with the singing Aṅgirasa seers, does not break the rock with a weapon. He breaks it with sound. The roar of the formula, the chant pitched true, splits the stone; the cattle pour out and the light returns. RV 2.24 and the great Vala hymn of the tenth book (RV 10.108) and the Aṅgirasa hymns of the fourth keep returning to this: he cleaves Vala by the bráhman, he drives the kine forth, he lows after the cattle and they answer, the cave gives way before the held note. The same deed is told elsewhere of Indra splitting Vala’s brother Vṛtra with the thunderbolt — and the doubling is the point. Where Indra’s is the myth of force, Brihaspati’s is the myth of the word: the same victory, won by saying rather than by striking. The cave that yields to a sound is the clearest single statement of what the god is for.

The myth also folds the human into the divine in a way that is characteristic of him. The Aṅgirasas who chant beside Brihaspati are at once the legendary ancestral priests and the living singers who recite the hymn — so that the worshippers who perform the rite stand inside the myth they perform, cracking the rock again each time the formula is sung true. The cattle that pour out are not only the literal herds of a pastoral people but, in the layered reading the hymns invite, the dawns, the waters, the hidden light, the goods of the world withheld until the right word releases them. The recovery of the cows is, in this sense, the master-image of the whole sacrificial economy: what is locked away is opened by sound, and the opening is repeatable, because the formula can be spoken again.

The gods’ teacher: guru of the devas

Across the longer span of Indian tradition the figure divides and travels, and the priest of the hymns becomes a teacher with a personality and a rival. In the epics and the Purāṇas Brihaspati is the guru of the devas — the guru in the strict Indian sense, the preceptor through whom binding knowledge passes — set against Shukra, the preceptor of the asuras, the gods’ rivals. Where Shukra holds the art of reviving the slain (the sañjīvanī lore that keeps the asura ranks refilled), Brihaspati holds the counsel of heaven; the war between the two pantheons becomes, at one level, a contest of two teachers. Wisdom personified is not always wisdom triumphant: the narrative tradition is willing to show him outmaneuvered, his pupils stolen, his own household disordered. The Purāṇas tell of the Tārakāmaya war touched off when his wife Tārā is carried away by Soma, the moon — the gods ranged behind Brihaspati, others behind Soma — and of the child of that union, Budha, who is given to the planet Mercury, founder of the lunar line of kings. The preceptor of the gods, in other words, is not spared the indignities of story. His authority is in the word; his life is as snarled as anyone’s.

Brihaspati as the guru of the devas, depicted with the golden body and attributes of the planetary teacher. — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The rivalry with Shukra runs through some of the tradition’s most pointed teacher-tales. In the well-known episode of Kaca — Brihaspati’s son, sent to study under the enemy preceptor in order to wrest from him the secret of reviving the dead — the contest of the two gurus is told as a story of knowledge stolen and given, of a teacher’s daughter (Devayānī) and the limits a teacher will and will not cross, the science of resurrection passing across the line between the warring camps and back. The arc that runs from the divine purohita of the hymns to the guru of the epics is not a clean elevation but a thickening: the abstract lord of the formula acquires a wife, a son, a school, a rival, defeats and recoveries, until the god who once was simply the power of the right word becomes a character with a household and a reputation to lose. What is preserved across the change is the office. Whatever befalls him, he remains the one the gods consult — the keeper of counsel, the holder of the word on which the right action turns.

The name carried into the sky

The third life of the name is astronomical. In the jyotiṣa literature and the later cosmology of the nine grahas, the navagraha — the nine “seizers” that govern fortune — Brihaspati’s name is given to the planet Jupiter, called both Bṛhaspati and Guru. The transfer is fitting to the point of inevitability: the god of priestly knowledge becomes the planet of teachers, counsel, learning, and expansive good fortune, the most benevolent of the moving lights, the kāraka (significator) of wisdom and of the right ordering of life. The word graha itself means “seizer” — each of the nine is a power that lays hold of human fortune — and among them Brihaspati is read as the great benefic, the slow, golden, far-out light whose place in a chart marks the seat of judgment, learning, faith, and increase. His day is Bṛhaspativāra — Thursday, the day of the guru, named for him exactly as the Roman week named its fifth day for Jupiter, the planet’s other lord; that two great expansive sky-figures, arrived at independently, should converge on the same wandering light is one of the quieter marvels of comparative star-lore. The same logic that made the sayer of the formula the preceptor of the gods makes him, a tier further out, the slow-moving benefic whose station in a chart is read as the seat of judgment and grace. The figure persists by the same charge it began with: the authority of the one who knows the right word and the right counsel, whether he stands at the altar, at the head of the divine assembly, or in the band of the zodiac.

A twelfth-century Sena-dynasty stone relief of Brihaspati as Jupiter, one of the Indian planetary deities, now in the British Museum. — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

The materialist namesake: the Bārhaspatya strand

A last strand attaches the name not to faith but to its denial, and it has to be held carefully apart from the rest. Indian doxography credits a teacher called Bṛhaspati with the founding of the materialist current variously named Lokāyata, Cārvāka, and — from this attribution — Bārhaspatya, “stemming from Bṛhaspati.” Its base text, the Bārhaspatya sūtra, survives only in fragments quoted (usually to be refuted) by its opponents; the school it names rejected the authority of the Veda, denied an afterlife and the fruit of ritual, and admitted direct perception as the reliable means of knowledge. How a name so bound to the holiness of the sacred word came to head a school that denied the word’s ritual power is itself debated. One thread of the tradition turns it into a deliberate paradox — the gods’ own preceptor composing a false doctrine to mislead the asuras — which is best read as a later harmonization, an attempt to square an embarrassing namesake with the orthodox Brihaspati rather than a historical account of the school’s origin. (The materialist Bārhaspatya should not be confused with the Bṛhaspati sūtra of statecraft, a separate text on political science that also bears the name.) Whatever the route, the result is that the same name labels the lord of the efficacious formula and the school that held no formula efficacious at all — a measure of how much weight the name could carry, and how many directions it could be pulled.

The seam between a god and a function

What runs through the Vedic priest, the gods’ preceptor, the planet of fortune, and even the materialist namesake is a single recognition the tradition keeps returning to: that Brihaspati sits at the seam between a god and a power. Much of what the hymns say of him doubles what they say of the human priest and of the sacred word as such; the historians of religion read him, with Macdonell, in good part as that power made divine — speech and rite given a person to be. The parallel with figures elsewhere who govern the word and its potency, such as the Mesopotamian Nabu, lord of the scribal arts and keeper of the tablets of destiny, is real and worth following; it is also no more than a parallel, each tradition meaning its own thing by the holiness it grants to language. What stays constant through every turn of the name is the original charge: that to speak well, in the exact way, is to move the order of things.

Sources and scholarship

The Vedic Brihaspati rests on the Saṃhitā itself. Ralph T. H. Griffith’s The Hymns of the Rigveda (Benares, 1889–1896), long the standard complete English verse rendering and freely available, carries the Brahmanaspati hymns of the second book and the Vala hymn of the tenth where the deed of the cracked cave is told (sacred-texts.com). Arthur Anthony Macdonell’s A Vedic Reader for Students (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917) sets selected hymns in transliteration with close translation and grammatical apparatus, and remains the usual student’s door into the language of the hymns (Online Library of Liberty). The frame for reading the deity as a divinized function is Macdonell’s earlier Vedic Mythology (Strassburg, 1898), the survey of the Vedic pantheon whose treatment of Brihaspati / Brahmanaspati — and of the seam between the god and the priestly word — still organizes the discussion. For the later astronomical identity, the navagraha and the planet Guru belong to the jyotiṣa literature and its commentarial tradition; for the materialist namesake, the Bārhaspatya / Cārvāka school is reconstructed almost entirely from the fragments its critics preserved, surveyed in the standard accounts of Indian materialism such as the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on Lokāyata/Cārvāka.

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