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 IV IN FOCUS
Against wild beasts and thieves
Up from here have stridden three—tiger, man (púruṣa), wolf; since hey! go the rivers, hey! the divine forest-tree, hey! let the foes bow.
By a distant (pára) road let the wolf go, by a most distant also the thief; by a distant one the toothed rope, by a distant one let the malignant hasten (ṛṣ).
Both thy (two) eyes and thy mouth, O tiger, we grind up; then all thy twenty claws (nakhá).
The tiger first of [creatures] with teeth do we grind up, upon that also the thief, then the snake, the sorcerer, then the wolf.
Read the remaining 3 verses of IV.3
What thief shall come today, he shall go away smashed; let him go by the falling-off (apadhvaṅsá) of roads; let Indra smite him with the thunderbolt.
Ruined (mūrṇá) [are] the teeth of the beast (mṛgá); crushed in also [are its] ribs; disappearing be for thee the godhā́; downward go (ayat) the lurking (? çaçayú) beast.
What thou contractest (sam-yam) mayest thou not protract (vi-yam); mayest thou protract what thou dost not contract; Indra-born, soma-born art thou, an Atharvan tiger-crusher (-jámbhana).
Whitney–Lanman translation as printed (1905) · Read IV.3 at Wikisource ↗
ATHARVAVEDA · BOOK IV ALSO CITED
Against demons and other enemies
Read comparison hymn IV.36 (10 verses)
Them let him of real force burn forth—Agni Vāiçvānara, the bull; whoso shall abuse and seek to harm us, likewise whoso shall play the niggard toward us.
Whoso shall seek to harm us not seeking to harm, and whoso seeks to harm us seeking to harm—in the two tusks of Agni Vāiçvānara do I set him.
They who hunt in assent (? āgará), in counter-clamor (? pratikroçá), on new-moon [day], the flesh-eating ones, seeking to harm others—all those I overpower with power.
I overpower the piçācás with power; I take to myself their property; I slay all the abusers; let my design be successful.
The gods that hasten (hās) with him—they measure speed with the sun—with those cattle (paçú) that are in the streams, in the mountains, I am in concord.
I am a vexer (tápana) of the piçācás, as a tiger of them that have kine; like dogs on seeing a lion, they do not find a hiding-place (nyáñcana).
I cannot [bear] with piçācás, nor with thieves, nor with savages (? vanargú); the piçācás disappear from that village which I enter.
Whatever village this formidable power of mine enters, from that the piçācás disappear; [there] they devise not evil.
They who anger me, making a noise, as flies an elephant—them I think ill off, like mites (?) on a man (jána).
Let perdition halter him, as a horse with a horse-halter (-abhi-dhā́nī); the fool (malvá) that is angry at me, he is not loosed from the fetter.
Whitney–Lanman translation as printed (1905) · Read IV.36 at Wikisource ↗
The opening makes a shared threat category
Verse 1 groups tiger, human, and wolf as figures striding up. The identity of the “man” is not specified, but the next verse names a thief and sends both wolf and thief by distant roads. That pairing reveals the poem’s organizing interest. A predator can take cattle through hunting; a human can take them through theft. From the herd owner’s perspective both produce disappearance and insecurity. The river and forest-tree images of the opening are difficult in Whitney’s notes, so their exact ritual significance should not be overstated. The clearer spatial request is for dangerous visitors to go elsewhere before reaching the cattle.
Predator anatomy becomes a target
The third verse addresses a tiger and imagines its eyes, mouth, and twenty claws ground down. Verse 4 adds teeth and then layers thief, snake, sorcerer, and wolf into the same defeat. These are harsh words about animals as well as people. Their anatomical detail is not a neutral zoological observation; it names the capacities by which a predator catches prey. To remove eyes, mouth, teeth, or claws in the poem is to make the animal unable to take from the herd. The effect is imagined verbally. The text does not document a performed act against a particular animal, and a modern article should preserve the historical voice without turning it into practical instruction.
The thief returns as a person on a road
Verse 5 asks that any thief arriving today go away broken, on a failing road, while Indra strikes with his thunderbolt. This time the human threat is singled out rather than folded into the animal list. Its road image resumes the earlier wish that wolf and thief take distant paths. The hymn keeps drawing a boundary around the herd by rerouting possible intruders. Verse 6 becomes much more obscure; Whitney discusses several incompatible readings of the animals and their movements. That uncertainty makes it safer to describe the broad pattern of threatened cattle, diverted approach, and incapacitated attackers than to invent a precise scenario for every difficult word.
A later village hymn groups threats differently
IV.36 also names thieves with piśācas and other feared beings, but it imagines spirits vanishing from the village the empowered speaker enters. IV.3 is centered on cattle exposed to predators and a possible robber. Whitney says the Kauśikasūtra uses IV.3 for the prosperity and safety of cows, a fitting later application. Pāippalāda omits the fifth verse and orders the rest 1–3, 7, 6, 4. Thus the particularly direct verse about a thief arriving today is absent there. The witnesses preserve overlapping but not identical forms of herd defense. The received Śaunaka poem makes human theft especially explicit.
WORKED READING
One road, two kinds of danger
Read IV.3.2, where wolf and thief are both sent by far roads, beside IV.3.5, which singles out a thief arriving today. The first treats predator and robber as parallel threats to cattle; the second narrows the concern to a human arrival. Compare IV.36.7, where thieves appear with piśācas in a village rather than beside a herd. The change of setting explains why the categories overlap but are organized differently in the two hymns. The word 'today' in the later verse gives the broader predator list an immediate human urgency rather than a timeless landscape.