A maiden’s love-charm. The Atharvan instructs a young woman to dig up a particular herb and use it to draw her preferred man to her, naming the figure of Asuri who once drew Indra down from the gods. The hymn is striking for two reasons: women’s agency in love-magic is taken for granted, and the cosmology already has a category of female demonic power (Asuri) who can bend even Indra. Whitney points out this stratum is some of the earliest evidence in Indo-European literature for the witchcraft-romance subgenre. Modern reception: scholars of South Asian women’s religion (Wendy Doniger, Jamison) treat hymns like this as load-bearing data for Vedic women’s lived practice.