Women

Notes

By the editor.

1. The hymn is Ṛgveda X.123, the Vena hymn. Its title figure is a luminous, yearning being (the root ven means to long for) who rises from the waters toward the sun. A woman appears only once, in verse 5: the yoṣā, a young woman or consort, who bears her lover, the Apsaras's beloved, in the highest heaven. Her opening makes that single figure the whole subject. source ↩
2. The Vedic pair behind this is sat and asat, being and non-being. The Creation Hymn (X.129) opens by saying that neither existed at first. The same pair returns in her Fulfilment of the Way, where Somethingness is shown to be Emptiness. In What the Ghosts Actually Are she calls the bottom of Doom's well the Mother, who "looks like nothing because she is everything." source ↩
3. Genesis 1:27 says God made humankind in his image, "male and female created he them." The Vena hymn has no such line, but its single human-scale figure is a woman holding the highest heaven (verse 5). In What the Ghosts Actually Are she writes that the Mother is in everything and that the mind we have is hers, so the claim reads as the same teaching said as a woman's dignity. source ↩
4. Verse 4 puts beasts beside the seers: the poets knew the form and went to the ghoṣa, the voice or roar, of the deer and the buffalo. Verse 6 names the golden-winged bird as messenger of Varuṇa. The Vedic cosmos does not divide gods from animals the way later morals do. source ↩
5. Verses 1 and 3 give the image: the sages caress the newborn "as one licks a child" with their hymns (rihanti), and the "mothers of the calf", cows of one stall, lick the honey of the immortal word. Milk, honey and speech run together. The nursing mother is the Vedic picture of the source, and her line says it plainly. source ↩
6. The original calls the waters' songs vāṇīḥ, voices, the "voices of honey and immortality" of verse 3, and verse 2 raises a wave from the ocean. Hers joins them: the old hymn is a sound without a speaker, flowing from the waters. In the Veda such utterance is a power in itself, as in her Mother translation of X.125, where Speech herself speaks. source ↩
7. Verse 6 sees a suparṇa, a fair-winged bird, flying up to the sky: golden-winged, a messenger of Varuṇa, a falcon (śakuna) in the place of Yama. The suparṇa is the sun-bird of the Veda and later became Garuḍa. The seer's heart rises with it, as hers does. source ↩
8. In the Veda the waters come first. The Golden Embryo hymn (X.121) says the great waters held the germ and gave birth to Agni, fire. Vena's hymn sets his birth in the "meeting of the waters" and the sun (verse 1), so her floating figure is in the oldest Vedic scene there is. In What the Ghosts Actually Are, she calls the waters "like nothingness." source ↩
9. This is hiraṇyagarbha, the Golden Womb of RV X.121, source of the universe. Later it became a name of Brahmā, who was born from a golden egg. The Vena hymn does not name it, but it is full of gold: the golden wings (verses 5 and 6) and the "golden womb" belong to the same shining world. source ↩
10. Doom here is the Old English dōm, law, judgment, fate. In What the Ghosts Actually Are she gives it the sense of the law of all things, "neither God nor devil." The Vedic word nearest is ṛta, the order that verses 2 and 3 of the hymn keep naming, on whose "summit" the shining one stands. See also On Doom, and the Lineage You Are Founding. source ↩
11. Verse 8 closes the hymn with the sun-figure: bhānuḥ śukreṇa śociṣā, the shining one with bright flame, who loves the third realm of space. Her radiance, warmth and remembered nature follow it. Verse 1 had already tied the child of the waters to the sun. source ↩