Brihaspati

← Encyclopedia

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.

He is one of the more frequently invoked figures of the Rigveda. The hymns cast him as the divine purohita, the household priest who stands before the gods as a human priest stands before his patron, and they credit his word with real effect in the world: it shatters obstacles, finds lost cattle, and opens the way. The best-known myth attached to him is the freeing of the cows penned in a rock cave by the demon Vala — released, in the telling, not by a weapon but by the sound of song, Brihaspati and the singing seers cracking the rock with their voices. The image gathers up what the god is for: the conviction, basic to Vedic religion, that rightly ordered speech is itself a force.

Across the longer span of Indian tradition the figure divides and travels. In the epics and Puranas Brihaspati becomes the guru of the devas, the preceptor of the gods, set against Shukra, teacher of their rivals the asuras — wisdom personified, and sometimes outmaneuvered. In the astronomical and astrological literature his name is given to the planet Jupiter, called Guru or Bṛhaspati among the navagraha, the nine “seizers” that govern fortune; there the god of priestly knowledge becomes the planet of teachers, counsel, and expansive good fortune. A later, separate strand even attaches the name to a school of materialist thought, the Bārhaspatya, complicating any single portrait.

Scholarship has long noted that Brihaspati sits at the seam between a god and a function. Much of what the hymns say of him doubles what they say of the human priest and of the sacred word as such, and historians of religion read him in part as that power made divine — speech and rite raised to a person. The parallel with figures elsewhere who govern the word and its potency, such as the Mesopotamian Nabu, lord of the scribal arts, 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 the Vedic priest, the gods’ preceptor, and the planet of fortune is the original charge: that to speak well, in the exact way, is to move the order of things.

→ Related: Nabu · Divination