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 VII IN FOCUS
Against a (woman) rival: with a plant
O rough one! thou of rough creepers! cut up yon woman, O rough one!—that thou mayest be hateful (?) to yon man of virile power.
Rough art thou, a rough one; poisonous, a poisonous one art thou;—that thou mayest be avoided, as a barren cow (? vaçā́) of a bull.
Whitney–Lanman translation as printed (1905) · Read VII.113 (118) at Wikisource ↗
ATHARVAVEDA · BOOK VII ALSO CITED
Against enemies
Read comparison hymn VII.114 (119) (2 verses)
I take from thy entrails (vakṣáṇā), I take from thy heart, from the aspect of thy face, I take all thy splendor.
Forth from here let anxieties go, forth regrets (? anudhyā́), and forth imprecations; let Agni smite the she-demoniacs; let Soma smite the abusers (f.).
Whitney–Lanman translation as printed (1905) · Read VII.114 (119) at Wikisource ↗
The addressee is first a plant
The opening piles up roughness: a rough being, rough creepers, and another appeal to the rough one. Repetition makes a quality feel transferable. The plant is asked to cut or break the woman named as rival; the second half then imagines her becoming hateful to a man. The poem's leap is from physical texture to social rejection. It does not claim that the woman's acts justify this treatment. She is constituted as an enemy by the speaker's desire to exclude her. The historical force of the verse lies in that coercive wish, not in a hidden herb recipe to be reconstructed for modern use.
The second verse changes cutting into avoidance
Verse 2 again names the plant as rough and then poisonous, before comparing the rival's desired exclusion to a barren cow being avoided by a bull. The animal image moves the poem into sexual and reproductive competition without supplying a full story of the parties involved. Whitney marks the rendering of the cow word as uncertain. The repeated adjectives are more stable than the exact simile: harshness should cling to the target until a man turns away. This is a wish about another person's social and intimate position. It cannot establish either the rival's motives or any actual consequence of the words spoken against her.
Witnesses do not give one neat plant identity
Pāippalāda reads a different form of the plant name and changes much of the first verse's latter half. Whitney's note also records a commentator's attempts to identify the plant and a later ritual association with a named herb. Those are different levels of evidence. The Śaunaka verse addresses a rough plant; the commentator and ritual tradition offer ways of specifying that plant; the alternate recension does not simply copy the same line. A reader should resist turning all of them into one certain modern species. The uncertainty is meaningful because the poem's literary logic needs roughness and aversion more than it needs a secure botanical label.
The next hymn changes the mode of attack
VII.114.1 imagines taking splendor from a rival's entrails, heart, and face, a more anatomical transfer than VII.113's plant-mediated aversion. Whitney suggests that this first verse of VII.114 belongs closely with VII.113, while its second verse seems to join a different healing context. The neighboring placement therefore reveals both thematic continuity and a seam. One hymn makes the rival repellent; the other removes valued brightness. A modern working titled after the plant poem would be a contemporary invention, not a recovered ancient process. The poems tell us what one partisan voice wished, not whether the targeted woman was harmed.
WORKED READING
A worked comparison
Compare VII.113.1's repeated rough plant with VII.114.1's removal of splendor from heart and face. In the first, a plant's abrasive character becomes a model for making a rival unwanted; in the second, the speaker claims to take a valued quality out of the rival's body. VII.113.2's barren-cow comparison adds a desired social result—avoidance by a man. The comparison clarifies how consecutive hymns can pursue exclusion through different images while still leaving the actual human dispute untold. The cow comparison shifts from the plant's rough quality to the rival's hoped-for social isolation, linking texture with avoidance.