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The Fifth Book, and a Sun Recovered from Darkness

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The Fifth Book, and a Sun Recovered from Darkness

Books two to seven of the Rigveda are the family books, each belonging to a lineage of composers, and the fifth is the Atri collection. Its hymns are addressed chiefly to Agni, to Indra, to the Maruts and to the All Gods, and the poets who sign them are Atri and men described as his descendants, which is how a Vedic seer works: the name is a school as much as an individual, and hymns continue to be composed under it for generations.

One hymn of that book has drawn attention far beyond its length. In it a being called Svarbhanu strikes the sun with darkness, so that the creatures stand bewildered and cannot recognise their own places, and Atri finds the sun hidden by the darkness that did not belong to it and puts it back in the sky by the fourth ritual formula. The passage has been read since antiquity as a description of an eclipse, and it is one of the very few candidates for an observational record inside the Rigveda. Whether the poets were describing an event, or a myth, or both at once, is not settled and probably cannot be.

The claim the hymn makes is not astronomical, though. It is that a correctly performed rite restored the light. That is the Vedic position in its most concentrated form: the ritual is not a petition to a power that acts, it is the act, and the seer who knows the formula is the one who does it.

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