THE TEXT · ATHARVAVEDA
Hymns discussed in this article
These verses give the wording and sequence examined in the article below.
ATHARVAVEDA · BOOK III IN FOCUS
Against enemies: with açvatthá
The male (púmāṅs) [is] born out of the male—the açvatthá forth from the khadirá; let it smite my foes, whom I hate and who [hate] me.
Crush them out, O açvatthá, our violent foes, O expelling one, allied with Vṛtra-slaying Indra, with Mitra, and with Varuṇa.
As thou, O açvatthá, didst break out [the khadirá] within the great sea, so do thou break out all these, whom I hate and who [hate] me.
Thou that goest about overpowering, like a bull that has overpowered—with thee here, O açvatthá, may we overpower our rivals.
Read the remaining 4 verses of III.6
Let perdition bind them, with unreleasable fetters of death—my foes, O açvatthá, whom I hate and who [hate] me.
As, O açvatthá, ascending them of the forest-trees, thou dost put them beneath thee (ádhara), so the head of my foe do thou split apart and overcome.
Let them float forth downward, like a boat severed from its mooring (bándhana); of them, thrust forth by the expelling one, there is no returning again.
I thrust them forth with mind, forth with intent and incantation; forth with branch of tree, of açvatthá, we thrust them.
Whitney–Lanman translation as printed (1905) · Read III.6 at Wikisource ↗
Growth supplies the first analogy
The opening describes a male sprung from a male and sets aśvattha against khadira. The gendered beginning underlines vigor, but the botanical scene does the harder work. An aśvattha can begin on another tree and grow into a dominant presence. Whitney’s note says it usually does so on śamī and here on the hard khadira. The poem asks that this relationship be transferred to enemies whom the speaker hates and who hate him. That reciprocal wording defines the feud from the speaker’s view. The request is violent, but it does not start with a weapon forged by humans. It starts with an observed contest for place.
The tree becomes a conquering ally
Verse 2 calls the aśvattha a displacer and joins it with Indra, Mitra, and Varuṇa. Verse 3 pictures its breaking into the great air and asks it to break the enemy’s position. Verse 4 compares its conquest to a bull. These shifts increase the scale of the plant: rooted growth becomes an ally of gods and then a charging animal. The sequence is not a botanical treatise. Each image offers a different reason to believe the tree can overcome resistance: it overtops, it breaks outward, and it advances with force. The poem keeps returning to the desired defeat, using nature as a model of social victory.
Displacement turns into no return
Later verses are harsher. Nirṛti is asked to bind enemies, the tree’s climbing becomes an image of overcoming a person, and opponents are compared to a boat loosed from its moorings. That boat image changes the threat from being pressed down to being carried away without return. The final verse says that the speaker drives them out with mind, thought, and incantation, and with an aśvattha branch. The branch does not stand alone as a magic gadget: it is the material end of a sequence that has already made the tree’s growth a model for conquest. The speaker’s own cognition is named beside the physical object.
A second translation makes the structure visible
Bloomfield’s translation calls the tree a displacer and is especially clear about the final branch. Whitney’s version and commentary discuss the aśvattha’s relation to its host tree, but the English phrasing of individual lines differs. The shared trajectory is more important than any single modern title: growth on khadira, overtopping rivals, and expelling them. A comparison with III.1 also marks the difference. There, gods disable an enemy army’s hands and eyes; here, the aśvattha’s own life pattern supplies the model. The hymn does not show that a tree harmed anyone. It records a speaker’s attempt to make a natural image carry an adversarial hope.
WORKED READING
From host tree to loosened boat
Take verse 1 and verse 7 as the endpoints of a reading. At first, aśvattha has sprung from khadira, a close physical relation in which one organism comes to dominate another. By verse 7, enemies drift like a boat cut loose, unable to return. The link is displacement: losing one’s place becomes losing one’s way back. Verse 8 then names the branch, thought, and incantation that give this imagined displacement a ritual voice. Reading only the crushing line would miss the poem’s longer spatial argument.