Devalok
Origin · 1 telling · Pan-India

Rudra, the howling archer of the Rigveda

Who is in it

Texts: Rigveda

The story, beat by beat

  1. The Rigveda addresses Rudra in three whole hymns and mentions him about seventy-five times.
  2. He is a fierce archer with matted hair and a tawny body, feared for his arrows and asked to spare cattle and children.
  3. The same hymns call him the best of physicians and father of the storm-band, the Maruts.
  4. One late hymn says he has two natures, a wild one and a kind one, and calls the kind one shiva.
  5. The Yajurveda's Shatarudriya litany strings his terrible and protective names together for the fire rite.
  6. Over the epics and Puranas the adjective shiva becomes the proper name of the great god.

storm healing fear vedic layer

How it is told, place by place

Base telling · Primary text (translation)

Rigveda and Yajurveda

Pan-India All traditions

In the oldest layer of the Veda, Rudra is a god to be handled carefully. Three hymns are given wholly to him. He comes as an archer with braided hair and a reddish body, and the singers ask him to turn his arrows away from their cows and their sons. Yet the same singers call him the best healer among healers and the father of the Maruts who ride the storm. In a late hymn the poet says Rudra has two sides, one wild and one gentle, and names the gentle side shiva, the kind one. The Yajurveda later gathers a hundred of his names, fierce and mild together, into the Shatarudriya, which priests still chant over the linga. Only in the epics and Puranas does the adjective settle into the name of the great god himself.

Rudra — Wikipedia; Shiva — Wikipedia; Hymns of the Rigveda, tr. R. T. H. Griffith (1896) — sacred-texts § 1.114,2.33,7.46,10.92 unverified

Sources: Rudra — Wikipedia; Shiva — Wikipedia; Hymns of the Rigveda, tr. R. T. H. Griffith (1896) — sacred-texts

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