Atharva Veda · 158 of 724

HYMN XXI

A hymn to the War-drum and various deities for victory 1. Speak to our enemies, O Drum, discouragement and wild dismay. We bring upon our foemen fear and discord and discomfiture. Drum! drive these enemies away. 2. When sacrificial butter hath been offered, let our foemen flee. Through consternation, terrified, trembling in mind and eye and heart. 3. Wrought out of wood, compact with straps of leather, dear to all the clan, Bedewed with sacrificial oil, speak terror to our enemies. 4. As the wild creatures of the wood flee in their terror from a man, Even so do thou, O Drum, roar out against our foes to frighten them, and then bewilder thou their thoughts. 5. As, when the wolf approaches, goats and sheep run sorely terrified, Even so do thou, O Drum, roar out against our foes to frighten them, and then bewilder thou their thoughts. 6. As birds of air, day after day, fly in wild terror from the hawk, as from a roaring lion's voice, Even so do thou, O Drum, roar out against our foes to frighten them, and then bewilder thou their thoughts. 7. May all the deities whose might controls the fortune of the fray Frighten away our enemies with Drum and skin of antelope. 8. Let those our enemies who go yonder in their battalions shake. In fear at shadows and the sounds of feet which Indra sporteth with. 9. To all the quarters of the sky let clang of bowstrings and our Drums. Cry out to hosts of foes that go discomfited in serried ranks. 10Āditya, take their sight away! Follow them close, ye motes of light. Let them cleave fast to foot-bound hosts when strength of arm hath past away. 11. Do ye, O mighty Maruts, sons of Prisni, crush down, with Indra for ally, our foemen. King Soma. Varuna, great God and sovran, Indra too, aye, Death,— 12. May these embattled Gods, brilliant as Sūrya—All hail!—one- minded conquer those who hate us.

Insight

The most fully developed takman hymn in your range. The priest addresses fever as a person with a home (the Mūjavans, the Mahāvrishas, the Bahlikas: mountain peoples of the northwest frontier) and tries to send him home. The geographical specificity is itself an ethnographic document: malarial fever was understood as a foreign affliction native to particular regions, and the rite of casting it back to its homeland mirrors what modern epidemiology would call a vector-source mental model. Bloomfield's commentary on this hymn (SBE 42 pp. 1-9, with extensive notes) is still the best entry to the takman material. The dismissal in verse 6, with its bare address to Fever as a snake and a limbless one, told to speak out and depart, is one of the strangest direct apostrophes to a disease in any literature.Bloomfield SBE 42 pp. 1-9; Karttunen India in Early Greek Literature on northwest tribal references.