Atri

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.

The Puranic Atri is defined largely by his wife. Anasuya, whose name means without envy, is held up as the model of a certain kind of power: fidelity so complete that it becomes a force other beings must reckon with.

The story most often told about her turns on that. The three great gods, prompted in most versions by their own wives, come to the hermitage as brahmin guests and make an impossible demand: they will accept food only if she serves it naked. Refusing a guest is a serious fault and complying is unthinkable. She sprinkles water on them, turns all three into infants, and feeds them as a mother, which satisfies the letter of the request and empties it of meaning. When the goddesses come to ask for their husbands back, the three are restored, and portions of them are born to her as sons: Soma, who is the moon, Dattatreya, in whom all three are combined, and Durvasa, who carries the destructive temper.

Dattatreya is the consequential one. He became the centre of a devotional tradition of his own, strong in Maharashtra and Karnataka, understood as a teacher figure combining the three gods, and holding an unusual position between Vaishnava and Shaiva devotion.

The Ramayana brings the couple back into the narrative during the exile. Rama, Sita and Lakshmana come to Atri's hermitage, and Anasuya receives Sita separately and instructs her on the conduct of a wife, giving her ointments and clothing that will not soil. The scene is one of very few in the epic where a woman teaches a woman without a man present.