THE TEXT · ATHARVAVEDA
Hymns discussed in this article
Begin with the verses shown here. Open the other cited hymns to compare their images and aims.
ATHARVAVEDA · BOOK III IN FOCUS
Against enemies
Let Agni, knowing, go against our foes, burning against the imprecator, the niggard; let him confound (mohaya-) the army of our adversaries (pára); and may Jātavedas make them handless.
Ye, O Maruts, are formidable for such a plight; go forward upon [them], kill, overcome! The Vasus have killed [them]; suppliant [are] these; for let Agni, their messenger, go against [their foes], knowing.
The army of enemies, O bounteous one, playing the foe against us—do ye (two), O Vṛtra-slaying Indra, Agni also, burn against them.
Impelled, O Indra, forwards (? pravátā) by thy (two) bays—let thy thunderbolt go forth, slaughtering (pra-mṛ) the foes; smite the on-coming, the following, the fleeing (párāñc); scatter their actual intent.
Read the remaining 2 verses of III.1
O Indra, confound the army of our enemies; with the blast of fire, of wind, make them disappear, scattering.
Let Indra confound the army; let the Maruts slay with force; let Agni take away its eyes; let it go back conquered.
Whitney–Lanman translation as printed (1905) · Read III.1 at Wikisource ↗
ATHARVAVEDA · BOOK III ALSO CITED
Against enemies
Read comparison hymn III.2 (6 verses)
Let Agni our messenger, knowing, go against [them], burning against the imprecator, the niggard; let him confound the intents of our adversaries; and may Jātavedas make them handless.
Agni here hath confounded the intents that are in your heart; let him blow (dham) you away from [our] home; let him blow you forth in every direction.
O Indra! confounding [their] intents, move hitherward with [their] design (ā́kūti); with the blast of fire, of wind, make them disappear, scattering.
Go asunder, ye designs of them; also, ye intents, be confounded; also what is today in their heart, that smite thou out from them.
Confounding the intents of those yonder, seizing their limbs, O Apvā, go away; go forth against [them]; consume [them] in their hearts with pangs (çóka); pierce the enemies with seizure (grā́hi), the foes with darkness.
Yonder army of our adversaries, O Maruts, that comes contending against us with force—pierce ye it with baffling darkness, that one of them may not know another.
Whitney–Lanman translation as printed (1905) · Read III.2 at Wikisource ↗
The battle line is drawn at once
The first verse asks knowledgeable Agni to go against the speaker’s foes and confound the adversary army. The target is not an unnamed supernatural maker but a visible military formation. “Handless” may evoke fighters who cannot use their weapons; the poem does not pause to explain the exact mechanism. Verse 2 brings in the Maruts as aggressive allies. Whitney regards part of that second verse as corrupt, and the Pāippalāda reading gives a more intelligible appeal on behalf of supplicants. Even so, its place in the sequence is clear: the speaker is gathering divine participants before the hymn turns to specific means of scattering the attackers.
Confusion becomes movement in every direction
Verse 3 calls on Indra and Agni to burn the hostile army. Verse 4 asks Indra’s thunderbolt to strike oncoming, following, and fleeing enemies while scattering their intent. This grouping maps the field from front to rear; escape does not remove a fighter from the imagined divine reach. Whitney marks the phrase about scattering intent as difficult and discusses several possible renderings. The uncertainty should remain visible. Verse 5 returns to confounding the army and adds a blast of fire and wind. The recurring idea is not simply “kill the enemy”; it is to dissolve coordinated motion so a force no longer acts as one.
The close reverses the advance
In verse 6 Indra confounds the army, the Maruts strike it, Agni takes away its eyes, and the group goes back conquered. The series forms a sharp reversal of an approaching host: its hands fail, its designs scatter, its sight fails, and its advance becomes retreat. Whether the poem describes battlefield psychology or calls for supernatural intervention, its internal logic is coherent. It attacks the capacities by which an army fights together. The later Kauśikasūtra calls III.1 and III.2 “confounders” and applies them to a hostile army, but Whitney says the rite’s details do not illuminate the hymns. The verses deserve to be read on their own terms.
Shared lines with III.2, different target
III.2 opens with a line close to III.1, yet asks Agni to confound the adversaries’ intentions rather than their army. Its later verses dwell on designs in the heart and darkness in which one fighter cannot recognize another. The Pāippalāda sequence places these hymns in the opposite order from the Śaunaka collection. This is a meaningful edition difference because “first” and “second” depend on the recension. In the received Śaunaka order, III.1 begins with a physical army and III.2 presses deeper into its thought and perception. The shared wording connects them without making the two poems duplicates.
WORKED READING
From hands to eyes
Compare III.1.1 and III.1.6. The opening asks that the enemy become handless; the close asks Agni to remove its eyes before it goes back defeated. Hands and eyes are two capacities needed for coordinated attack. III.2.4 supplies the interior counterpart by ordering the adversaries’ designs to fall apart. Reading these together shows a battle poem imagined as the systematic undoing of an army’s ability to act, not merely a wish for a favorable outcome. The eye image at the close denies the army its shared perception, not simply its weapons; defeat is figured as failed coordination.