Vayu, the Maruts, and the Storm

After Varuna’s watchful order, the Rig Veda’s wind-gods are characteristically different — younger, faster, less moralised, much more concerned with the immediate physics of weather. Vayu and the Maruts are the storm itself, and the hymns about them are meteorology in mythic clothing.

Vayu (also called Vata, “wind”) is given a smaller number of hymns but is everywhere as a participant. He drinks Soma first, with Indra. He carries the offerings to the gods (the smoke goes where the wind takes it — a fact the priests obviously knew). The hymns to him are short and precise: he is fast, invisible, present-in-his-effects, the friend who arrives before he is seen. Modern readers will register that this is, in poetic form, an accurate description of air — characterised by what it moves rather than what it is.

The Maruts are the storm-band, the troop of young warriors who ride with Indra in the assault on Vritra. They are described as a gana — a group — and the hymns about them have a particular acoustic. They roar. They thunder. They drive in chariots that flash and shake. They are armed with golden spears (lightning), wear gleaming ornaments, ride spotted horses. The hymns are vivid, almost cinematic; reading them aloud one hears the cadences match the rhythm of an approaching squall.

For a scientific reading the Maruts cycle is the Rig Veda’s most literal meteorology. The hymns capture the storm’s components: the wind that comes first; the dust raised by it; the cattle running for shelter; the darkness; the lightning; the thunder’s roll; the burst of water; the clean air after. The poets are not describing the storm vaguely from indoors. They are describing it as people who watched it approach and arrive and pass, year after year, on open country. This is a culture whose imagery is calibrated to the weather because its survival was calibrated to the weather.

It is also worth marking the social observation embedded in the description. The Maruts are a warband — young men together, ornamented, loud, dangerous, beloved. The Vedic society itself had warbands of young men (called vrātyas in slightly later literature), and the Maruts are modelled on what those men were like to encounter. The Rig Veda continually does this — taking the natural phenomenon and describing it in the most intense human terms available, so that the description is at once empirically accurate and emotionally precise.

A few small things in the Maruts cycle interest the science-minded reader particularly. The hymns refer to lightning’s forks in distinction from its sheets, describe the colour shifts during a storm (the sky turning copper, then ash, then black), and mark the temperature drop that precedes the rain. They distinguish the first gust (the purvavayu) from the steady monsoon wind. These are observations whose register a modern meteorologist would recognise even if they would not phrase them the same way. The Veda is not, as is sometimes condescendingly assumed, a vague book of nature-feeling. It is, where weather is concerned, a field notebook in verse.

What this whole second movement of the book — Indra, Agni, Soma, Surya, Ushas, Varuna, the Maruts — adds up to is a single picture: a religion of meticulous attention to the natural world, organised around the phenomena that bore most heavily on a pastoral-agricultural society, with gods who personify those phenomena precisely enough that you can almost read the hymns as data with theology overlaid. The next chapter completes the picture with the gods of the rivers and the road, before the book turns to the deepest cosmological questions the Rig Veda asks.