The Ashvins

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Twice a day the sky has a hinge, and at both hinges, in the oldest Indian poetry, the same two riders appear. They come at the parting of night and day, in a car that gleams, drawn by horses or by birds, and they come fast — swifter than a blink, swifter than thought. They are young and they stay young. They are two and they are never apart. And almost everywhere the hymns find them, they are arriving to pull someone out of trouble.

These are the Ashvins, the divine twins of the Veda, and the substance of their worship is a list. Not a doctrine, not a cosmology, but a catalog of rescues — the drowning man drawn from the sea, the mare-warrior given a new leg of metal, the blind made to see, the old made young. The hymns to them are, in large part, the recitation of what they have already done, offered as the reason they will do it again.

Sons of the sky, gods of the seam

The name is transparent in its own language. Aśvin is built on aśva, “horse,” and the Ashvins are the horsemen, the horse-possessors, the ones whose element is the harnessed animal that draws the sky’s machinery. They carry a second name as well, used in the dual the way the first is: the Nasatyas, a word the tradition read as “the never-false” or “the bringers-home,” tied to a root for safe return — a fitting name for gods whose whole career is bringing the lost back. Where they are named singly, one is Nasatya and one Dasra, but this is rare; the hymns prefer them yoked, a single grammatical pair, two who act as one.

Their genealogy is given more than one way, and the Vedic frame does not force the versions to agree. In the Rigveda they are called divó nápātā, “sons of Dyaus” — descendants of the bright Sky-father, the same luminous heaven whose daughter is the dawn. They belong to the household of the sky the way Ushas does, and the two are bound together at the seam of the day: she is bidden to wake them, and they ride out behind her or beside her, so that the gods of the morning move into the light in her company. The Sun’s own car stands near. In the bridal hymn of the tenth book (RV 10.85), Surya — Suryaa, the daughter of the sun, the maiden of the solar disk — mounts the Ashvins’ chariot, and one strand of the tradition makes her their shared bride, the woman of the dawn-light who rides with the riders of the dawn. A later, post-Vedic telling gives them a different mother and a stranger birth: the wife of Surya the sun-god, fleeing his heat, takes the form of a mare, and the twins are conceived of a stallion and a mare — the horse-gods born, fittingly, of horses. That myth is not in the oldest hymns, and the Vedic and the Puranic births should not be folded into one; the early Ashvins are the sky’s sons and the dawn’s companions, and the mare-mother is a story the later books tell.

What is steady across the versions is the position. The Ashvins are gods of the threshold — of morning and of evening, of the moment the world tips from dark to light and back. The morning star and the evening star, one planet seen at two edges of the night, suit them exactly: two that are one, appearing at the two hinges. They are the deities of the in-between, and it is from the in-between — the shipwreck, the pit, the failing body, the place where a life is about to slip over the edge — that they do their work.

Birth of the celestial twins, folio from a Harivamsha (Lineage of Vishnu), India, c. 1585-1590. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (M.83.1.7), public domain.

The chariot and the catalog of rescues

The Ashvins’ chariot is described more lovingly, and more strangely, than almost any other object in the hymns. It is golden. It has three wheels and three seats and three supporting pillars; it turns three ways; it is yoked at the lifting of the dawn and it crosses heaven and earth in a single day’s circuit. It is drawn by many things — horses, but also bulls, swans, eagles, birds of every kind — and it is faster than the mind that imagines it. In it the twins range over the whole world, and they range over it to answer calls.

The calls are the heart of the matter. The Vedic hymn to the Ashvins is built, again and again, as a litany of past deliverances — the twins addressed as the ones who did this, and this, and this, and called now to come again. The rescues are named so often and so allusively that they must have been common knowledge, the shared property of the singers, and the modern reader meets them as a roll of half-told stories. A single hymn, RV 1.116, gathers a great number of them in one place, and it is from such hymns that the catalog is assembled.

There is Bhujyu, the son of Tugra, cast adrift on the sea — abandoned in the “cloud of waters,” in a place with nothing to stand on. The Ashvins draw him out. The hymn gives him animated ships, vessels that move through the air without wetting, and a craft of a hundred oars; over days and nights they bring him across the trackless water and set him down safe (RV 1.116.3-5; cf. 1.119.4). There is Vishpala, who lost a leg in the press of battle — cut away in the night of the conflict — and whom the twins fitted with a leg of metal, ayas, so that she could run again the moment the fighting reopened (RV 1.116.15). There is the sage Atri, shut in a pit and scorched by heat, whom they cooled and freed; and Rebha, stabbed and bound and thrown into the water, left for dead nine nights and ten days and raised out alive. There is Rijrashva, blinded — by his own father, in one telling, for slaughtering sheep to a wolf — to whom the Ashvins gave back his sight. There is Chyavana, an aged seer worn down to ruin, whom they stripped of his old body and made young and desirable again. They restore the barren to fertility and find a husband for the unwed; they give a son to the woman who has none; they bring milk from the cow that has gone dry. The pattern never varies. Something has broken, or someone is sinking, and the twins arrive in the gleaming car and make it whole.

A Rigveda manuscript page in Devanagari — the opening hymn of the first book. The rescue-hymns of the twins were chanted from memory for many centuries before any scribe set them down. Photo Ms Sarah Welch, CC BY-SA 4.0.

This is why the Ashvins are, above the rest of the pantheon, the physicians of the gods — the only healers among the immortals, the ones who mend. In a religion whose great powers are mostly powers of scale — the storm-god Indra who splits the dragon, the fire Agni who carries the offering, the binding sovereign Varuna who watches the moral order — the Ashvins are the gods of the particular emergency. They are not cosmic in the way the others are cosmic; they are intimate. They deal in individual bodies and single disasters. The hymn does not ask them to uphold the world. It asks them to come down to one shipwreck, one severed leg, one closed eye, and to fix it.

There is a price attached to the most famous of these cures, and it reveals something about the gods’ standing in the early rite. The sage Chyavana, made young again, repays the twins by winning them a share of the soma — the pressed offering of the sacrifice — over the objection of Indra, who had wanted the healer-twins kept out of the company of the great gods because they moved too freely among mortals. The story is, among other things, an account of how the Ashvins forced their way into the sacrifice: the physicians who walked among men, half outsiders, who had to be argued into the high liturgy and who got there by curing a man and calling in the debt.

The bright twins of the inherited religion

Set the Ashvins beside the gods of the related peoples, and a face that recurs comes into focus. The languages of Europe, Iran, and northern India descend from a single unrecorded parent tongue, and the comparison of their oldest religious vocabulary lets scholars reconstruct — cautiously, as a reconstruction and not a record — some of the figures that parent culture must have addressed. Among the most secure of these is a pair of Divine Twins: youthful horsemen, sons of the sky-god, brothers or husbands of the sun-maiden, who rescue men in danger and especially at sea, who heal, and who are tied to the morning and the evening star. The Ashvins fit the template so closely that they are treated as one of its clearest witnesses.

The Greek counterparts are the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, the “boys of Zeus,” sons of Leda, brothers of Helen. They too are horsemen; they too are saviors, above all of sailors — invoked by mariners in storms, appearing in the rigging as the electric glow later called St. Elmo’s fire, the patrons to whom a ship in peril called out. And they carry a feature the comparison finds suggestive: one of them, Castor, is mortal, the son of a human king, while Pollux is the immortal son of the god. When Castor is killed, Pollux asks to share his own deathlessness, and the two are set among the stars as the constellation of the Twins, alternating between the heavens and the underworld. The split paternity — one twin of the god, one of the man — recurs in the family, and some readers find a shadow of it in the Ashvins’ double genealogy. The Baltic traditions keep the same pair: the Lithuanian Ašvieniai, the Latvian “sons of God” who pull the sun’s chariot across the sky, their name built, like Aśvin, on the inherited word for horse.

The comparison is a scholarly reconstruction, drawn from regular correspondences of language and from shared narrative shape, not from any common text the peoples preserved. But it is among the strongest such reconstructions, and it makes the Ashvins something more than a local pair of healers. They are a deep inheritance — the saving twins as the steppe ancestors of half a world’s religions seem to have imagined them, riding to the wreck and the battlefield, carried over thousands of years and thousands of miles by peoples who no longer remembered they had once shared a god.

Marble votive relief of the Dioscuri — the Greek divine horse-twins — mounted above a winged Victory, Thessaly, 2nd century BCE. Louvre, Paris. Photo Gary Todd, CC0 1.0.

A name in a treaty, and the long afterlife

The oldest dated trace of these gods is not in India at all. In the cuneiform archive of the Hittite capital there survives a treaty, sworn in the mid-fourteenth century BCE — around 1350 BCE, in the standard chronology — between the Hittite king Suppiluliuma and Shattiwaza, a prince of the kingdom of Mitanni in northern Mesopotamia. Mitanni was ruled by a line whose population spoke a Hurrian language, but whose dynasty carried names, technical horse-training terms, and gods drawn from an Indo-Aryan stratum kindred to the language of the Veda. At the close of the treaty, the divine witnesses are summoned to guarantee the oath, and among them, in their cuneiform spelling, stand Mitra, Varuna, Indra — and the Nasatya, the twin gods, named in the dual. This is the earliest securely dated attestation of the Ashvins anywhere: not in a hymn, but in an international treaty sworn far to the west, by a king whose chariotry spoke a tongue close to the one in which the rescue hymns were sung. The horse-gods appear first in a document about horses and oaths, guaranteeing a peace between two empires of the Bronze Age.

(The wider question of how an Indo-Aryan religious vocabulary reached Mitanni — and how the speakers of that vocabulary reached India — sits inside the long, live, and politically charged debate over the origins and movements of the Indo-Aryan-speaking peoples, which the treaty touches but does not settle. The treaty’s gods are secure; the migrations behind them are argued.)

Within the Indian tradition itself, the Ashvins kept a fixed and modest place. They are the gods of the first light, and the ritual honored that. In the developed soma sacrifice, the twins receive their offering at the morning pressing, at the dawn-recitation that opens the day’s liturgy with their name. They are the chief deities of the Pravargya, the rite in which a vessel of milk is heated to glowing and offered to them — the gods of warmth and restoration receiving the heated draught. And they keep their character as physicians into the later age: when the medical tradition grew into a sacred science, it traced its origin upward to the Ashvins, the healers of the gods, so that the art of mending the body kept a divine genealogy at its head.

The epic remembered them through their children. In the Mahabharata, the five Pandava brothers are each the son of a god, and the youngest two — the twins Nakula and Sahadeva, born of one mother by the invocation of the twin deities — are the sons of the Ashvins: handsome, skilled with horses, the beautiful and the wise of the five. The pattern holds even there. The divine twins of the hymns father human twins in the great story, and the inheritance of the saving pair runs on through the literature that succeeded the Veda.

What does not pass is the older intimacy of the hymns — the sense of two gods who were, before anything else, the ones called upon when one was sinking. The high gods of the Veda govern; the Ashvins answer. The poets seem to have prized them for exactly that, and they kept the catalog of rescues alive by reciting it, each singer adding his own distress to the list of distresses already relieved, certain that the riders who had come for Bhujyu in the open sea and for Vishpala on the field would hear the chariot called for, and come.

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