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 VI IN FOCUS
For success against enemies
Everywhere about the routes Indra and Pūshan have gone; let yonder armies of our enemies today be confounded further away.
Go about confounded, ye enemies, like headless snakes; of you there, confounded by Agni, let Indra slay each best man (vára).
Fasten thou, as bull, the skin upon them; make the fear of the fallow-deer; let the enemy hasten (eṣ) away; let the cow hasten hither to us.
Whitney–Lanman translation as printed (1905) · Read VI.67 at Wikisource ↗
ATHARVAVEDA · BOOK VI ALSO CITED
For success against enemies
Read comparison hymn VI.66 (3 verses)
Handless be the assailing foe—they who come with armies to fight us; make them, O Indra, collide with the great weapon; let their evildoer (? aghahārá) run (drā), pierced through.
Ye who run (dhāv) stringing [the bow], drawing [the arrow] (ā-yam), hurling—handless are ye, O foes; Indra hath now demolished you.
Handless be the foes; their limbs we make to relax (mlā); then will we, O Indra, share among us their possessions hundred-fold.
Whitney–Lanman translation as printed (1905) · Read VI.66 at Wikisource ↗
The routes are occupied first
The opening says Indra and Pūṣan have gone all around the routes and asks that the opposing armies be confounded farther off. Whitney glosses the result as keeping them from the speaker’s villages. The enemy is not yet pictured in direct collision. Its approach is intercepted before arrival, and the gods are stationed at paths that would connect hostile troops to a protected settlement. Pūṣan’s presence is especially fitting in a road scene, but the poem does not explain a formal map or defensive perimeter. It works through a quick claim that divine powers are already out on the routes and can make an army’s movement fail.
The headless snake expresses futile motion
Verse 2 addresses the enemy as wandering in confusion like snakes deprived of heads. The comparison is disturbing, but its point is not merely gore. A body may still move while lacking the part that directs it. The army likewise may continue to bustle without reaching an effective destination. Agni is named as a force that has confounded them, and Indra is asked to strike their best fighter. The attack on a leading man fits the simile: remove direction and the collective stumbles. Whitney reports that related Rigvedic and Sāmavedic versions of the verse differ, including in how the enemies are described as driven or burned by Agni. The image circulated beyond this three-verse setting.
The final line reverses two journeys
Verse 3 is difficult in its first half, with a skin and the fear of a deer that Whitney calls obscure. The clearer ending asks the enemy to hasten away and the cow to hasten toward the speaker. That contrast completes the road argument. Men depart; valuable animals arrive. The hymn makes victory partly an exchange of movement across a frontier. It should not be presented as a simple defensive wish that leaves property out of view. Nor can the obscure skin image be confidently unpacked into a lost ritual action. The reliable movement is from blocked access to enemy dispersal and a desired inflow of cattle.
Its neighboring battle poems disable differently
VI.65 and VI.66 both use the handless image against bow-armed opponents. VI.67 relies instead on wrong routes and headless, purposeless motion. Whitney notes that VI.67 is absent from the Pāippalāda recension in his evidence, unlike its two predecessors. That makes a direct verse-order comparison unavailable here. Later Kauśikasūtra use groups the three in victory rites and also puts VI.67 with VI.98 in a kingly battle setting. Those applications show how the hymns were clustered, but the textual difference remains: this poem defeats an army by making its path fail and redirecting goods toward the speaker’s side.
WORKED READING
Two directions in three verses
Start at VI.67.1, where gods occupy the roads and the hostile army is asked to lose its way far off. In VI.67.2 the headless-snake comparison makes that loss of direction visible. At the end of VI.67.3, enemies go away and cattle come toward the speaker. The poem has arranged two opposite journeys. VI.66.2, by contrast, catches enemies at the instant of shooting. The comparison shows how adjacent battle hymns imagine defeat either by blocked movement or by disabled hands. The cattle's motion toward the speaker is the counterpart to the army's motion away, so the ending joins survival with material gain.