Rig Veda

Tradition:
Hindu (Vedic)
Form:
scripture
Approx. date:
c. 1500 BCE
Written down in:
Greco-Latin epoch

The oldest layer of Vedic religious poetry — 1,028 hymns to the Vedic devas (Agni, Indra, Soma, Varuṇa, Uṣas, the Maruts, the Aśvins), arranged into ten Maṇḍalas. Composed orally c. 1500–1200 BCE; Ralph T.H. Griffith's 1896 verse translation.

Source context· Indian stream · Ancient Indian cultural impulse
Stream
Indian
Cultural impulse
Ancient Indian (1st post-Atlantean cultural age)
Composed
c. 1500 BCE
Written down
Greco-Latin (4th post-Atlantean cultural age) manuscript epoch

What this work carries

The Rig Veda surfaces in textual form the oldest stratum of Vedic mantric wisdom, preserving in hymn-form what was originally received by the holy Rishis of the ancient Indian epoch. Its 1,028 hymns address the devas — Agni, Indra, Soma, Varuṇa, Uṣas — as still-living spiritual realities perceived by an atavistic clairvoyance now fading. The text marks the moment when oral mantric wisdom crystallized into fixed verse as direct spiritual perception receded.

Language frame

Vedic Sanskrit hymnic poetry, organized into ten Maṇḍalas, transmitted orally with extreme phonetic precision before written fixation. The word 'Rig' carries the sense of word or mantric utterance, marking these hymns as sounded spiritual formulae rather than discursive theology.

Steiner’s engagement

  • GA 90a, 1904-07-18Steiner identifies the Rig Veda as the most important part of the Vedas and explains that 'Rig' means 'word', with its teachings transmitted by great teachers in a specific mantric manner.
  • GA 113, 1909-08-30Steiner places the Rig Veda as the first of the three Vedic strata, corresponding to a distinct level of the threefold structure he traces in Eastern wisdom.
  • GA 93, 1904-05-23Steiner notes that in the oldest portions of the Rig Veda the asuras still designate the spiritual and divine — the term being identical with the Persian ahura — before the later inversion of the word.
  • GA 106, 1908-09-08Steiner cites a Rig Vedic verse describing how 'the seven' come over man, treating it as preserved testimony to what the ancient Indian pupil experienced inwardly in the encounter with cosmic sound.
  • GA 109, 1909-03-07Steiner situates the Vedas as the wellspring of Hindu religious thought, with the Upanishads forming their later concluding section.

Cross-tradition congruence

  • Avestan Gathas (Zoroastrian)The Rig Vedic asuras and the Avestan ahuras share a common pre-separation root, both naming the spiritual-divine before the Indo-Iranian inversion split the terms into opposing valuations of asura and deva.
  • Egyptian hymnic invocationBoth traditions preserve sounded mantric address to cosmic powers (Agni / Ra; Soma / Osiris-currents) at a stage when the named being was still inwardly perceptible to the priestly speaker.

JSON: /api/sources/rig-veda/index.json · Back to Sources.