I Am the Queen

Most hymns of the Rigveda are spoken by a poet to a god. This one is different. Nobody introduces the speaker and nobody questions her. A voice simply begins, and the voice says "I".

"I walk with the Rudras and the Vasus," she says. "I walk with the Adityas and with all the gods."

She is naming the great families of heaven, one after another, as her travelling companions. Then she goes further.

"I hold up Mitra and Varuna. I hold up Indra and Agni, and the two Ashvins. I carry Soma, and Tvashtri the maker, and Pushan and Bhaga."

She does not say that she is with them now. She says that she holds them up. If she let go they would fall.

She is Vac, Speech. The hymn never tells us her name. Tradition gives it, and gives the hymn its title, the Devi Sukta, the hymn of the Goddess. Inside the hymn she has no need to explain who she is.

"I am the Queen," she says. "I gather up treasures. I am the one who understands, and the first of those who deserve worship. The gods have set me down in many places. I have many homes."

Then she turns from the gods to people, and her words come down to the kitchen and the doorstep.

"It is through me that anyone eats his food," she says. "Everyone who sees, everyone who breathes, everyone who hears a word spoken, does it through me."

Then comes a line that is almost sad.

"They do not know it, yet they live beside me."

She pauses there, and calls out to whoever is listening.

"Hear me, you who have ears. What I am telling you is the truth."

She says that what she speaks is welcome to gods and to men alike. And she chooses. She is quite plain about that.

"The man I love, I make mighty. I make him a priest. I make him a seer. I make him wise."

She does not say that she rewards the deserving. She says that she makes great the one she loves.

In the last verses she grows very large.

"I bend the bow for Rudra," she says, "so that his arrow strikes the one who hates the sacred word. I stir up battle for the people. I have gone through heaven and earth."

She has gone further than that.

"On the summit of the world I bring forth the Father. My own home is in the waters, in the sea. From there I spread out over every creature, and I touch the sky itself with the crown of my head."

One verse is left, and in it she compares herself to the thing that Speech is made of, which is breath.

"I blow like the wind, and I take hold of all the worlds. Beyond the sky, beyond this broad earth, so great have I become."

There the hymn ends. Nobody answers her. No poet steps forward to ask her for cattle or sons, as the poets ask of every other god. She has not offered anything, and nothing is requested. She has only said what she is.

Other poets of the Rigveda speak about Vac from the outside, and they are less sure of her.

One hymn is addressed to Brihaspati, the lord of sacred speech, and it remembers the beginning. The first seers went about giving names to things. That was the earliest speech there was. Whatever was best and purest in those seers had been hidden inside them, and it came out.

"They made language the way people clean grain in a sieve," the poet says.

Then they went looking for her on purpose. They followed the track of Vac by means of the sacrifice, the hymn says, and found that she had gone into the seers. They brought her out and shared her among many, and seven singers praise her together.

But she does not give herself to everyone.

"One man looks and never sees her," says the poet. "One man listens and never hears her. To another she shows herself as a loving wife, finely dressed, shows herself to her husband."

A man who abandons a friend, the same hymn says, has no share in her, however much of her he hears.

A second poet remembers a moment when she sat down among the gods.

"When Vac, queen of the gods, took her seat, speaking words that no one understood, the four quarters of the sky milked out food and strength. Where has the best part of her gone?"

He answers that the gods made her and that animals of every kind speak her. He calls her a milk cow and asks her to come.

A third poet, in a hymn of riddles, gives the answer to the question of where the rest of her is.

"Speech is measured out in four parts. The wise among the priests know them. Three parts are kept in hiding and do not stir. People speak only the fourth."