Atharva Veda · 13 of 724

HYMN XIII

A prayer to Lightning, for happiness 1. Homage to thee, the Lightning's flash, homage to thee, the Thunder's roar! Homage to thee, the Stone which thou hurlest against the undevout! 2. Homage to thee, Child of the Flood whence thou collectest fer- vent heat! Be gracious to our bodies, give our children happiness and joy. 3. Yea, homage be to thee, O Offspring of the Flood! Homage we pay to thee, the dart and fiery flame: For well we know thy secret and sublimest home, where thou as central point art buried in the sea. 4. Thou, Arrow, which the host of Gods created, making it strong and mighty for the shooting, Be gracious, lauded thus, to our assembly. To thee, that Arrow,. be our homage, Goddess!

Context

A woman's incantation against a co-wife or rival, the first of many such hymns in the Atharva. Polygyny is the assumed social ground; the speaker is asking that the rival be quietly removed from the household, ideally married off elsewhere. Comparable material survives in the Akkadian and Hittite spell-corpora, where similar formulas address rival women in households of the second millennium BCE. Calvert Watkins, in How to Kill a Dragon (1995), tracks structural parallels between Atharvan healing-formulas and Hittite and Greek ones; the rival-woman charm is part of the same shared Indo-European household-magic substrate. Bloomfield's commentary on this hymn (SBE 42, p. 105) flags the matter-of-fact tone — domestic conflict simply belonging to the priest's portfolio.Bloomfield SBE 42; Watkins 1995.