Vedic Religion

Vedic Religion is the earliest layers of the religion of India, the ancient religion that made its way into India carried by the Aryan people (“noble” or “royal” people) who were the children of the ancestors of the ancient Iranian people invading India from the Northwest.

The Vedic Aryans were an Indo-European people, connecting them with the same linguistic, cultural, and ethnic family as the Norse, Celts, Greeks, Hittites, Hurrians, Germans, Romans, Iranians and modern French, Spanish, and Italian peoples.

Vedic Religion was preserved as an oral tradition for thousands of years. We are not entirely certain when the Vedas were composed, but it seems likely that the majority of the Vedic scriptures were crafted into something close to their final form during the 2nd millennium BCE (between 2000–1000 BCE).

With that being said, there are elements of the Vedic scriptures (like the myths and legends of Norse, Zoroastrian, Sumerian, and Egyptian religion) that date back far beyond this date all the way to the Last Ice Age because they remember the Global Flood and the Ice Age encoded in myth, as well as retain memory of astronomical information which can be dated to this time with a fair certainty — at least several thousand years before the second millennium BCE.

The Vedas

The Vedas are the scriptures that hold Vedic Religion.

Vedic Cosmology

The cosmology found within Vedic Religion is extensive, complex, and oftentimes, contradictory. Perhaps this is due to its sheer age, the duration of time that it spent as an oral tradition — literally 2000 years of apparently very accurate preservation through oral transmission — and the time over which diverging sects, interpretations, and contradictory recollections were able to emerge. Whatever the case may be, it remains that Vedic Religion is one of the oldest continuous traditions in the world.

• Hiranyagarbha: The Golden Embryo of Creation — According to the Vedic scriptures, the universe was born from the Hiranyagarbha, the golden embryo. The universe was formless darkness, and in that darkness the Supreme Intelligence gave birth to himself (known by various names in various traditions such as Brahman and Svayambhu). According to one version, Prajapati was born from the golden embryo as well as the sky and sun.

Vedic Gods & Goddesses

The Vedic Gods & Goddess (and those of later Hinduism) are boundless. There are too many to name in a list that can be expected to be read, so we will concern ourselves here only with the central deities of Vedic Religion.

• Prajapati — whose name literally means “Lord of Creation” as well as “Lord of Creatures” and “Lord of All Born Beings”. Prajapati played a central role in Vedic cosmology, as he was the first to be born from the golden embryo (the Vedic interpretation of the Cosmic Egg) in the primordial waters in the early stages of creation. He is also considered the progenitor of all divine beings, the Devas and Asuras.

The Historical Context Of Vedic Religion

It is the belief among scholars that the earliest verses of the Vedas were composed around the period between 2000–1500 BCE. Yes, there are certain passages that are significantly older (such as the Shatapatha Brahmana) but in general, this is as good a date as any to go by.

Therefore, the cultures contemporary to the Vedic Peoples at c.2000 BCE were the Sumerians, Akkadians, and Minoans to the West.

The Vedic Aryans were also roughly contemporary with the Battle-Axe Culture, a Germanic people who made their way into Norway and Sweden during this age of the world. (This is important to note because both the germanic Battle-Axe culture and the Indo-Aryan Vedic peoples were Indo-European peoples. We see this evidenced extensively in the Indo-European Connection.)

The Roots of Vedic Religion

Nobody truly knows the origin of the Vedas. Many scholars have put forward theories, religious authorities have expressed their beliefs, and yet the origin of the vedas remains a much-debated point of contention among these circles. There is uncertainty. We do not truly know the origin of the Vedas, at least not for sure. Are they truly shruti (literally “what is heard”) revealed knowledge from the gods, or from the very fabric of creation, Brahman, the fundamental consciousness

What we do know, however, is that the Sanskrit language in which the Vedas is written is an Indo-European language. The Indo-European language family is probably the most extensive language family west of the Himilayas to the Atlanitic Ocean. Along with Sanskrit in this ancient language family is Iranian, Greek, Roman, French, German, Celtic, Spanish, Old Norse, and many more. In other words, an ancient people arrived into India from the northeast at some point in history, bringing with them the Indo-European language family, and the traditions that were chanted in this language, eventually codified into a “final” form, and one day, written down.

In the texts, these people were the Aryans, an ancient word that mean “noble”, “royal”, or perhaps “free”. When these Aryans arrived — and they do appear to have been an ethnic group — they applied their caste system onto the land that they arrived into and initiated one of the longest lasting racists systems that the world has ever known, which continues to this day.

What is more is that there are extensive connections between the Vedic mythical traditions, and those of essentially all other Indo-European peoples of that language family. There are extensive similarities, shared stories, and shared gods of people as distinct as Ireland to India, Iran to Norway, south again to Greece, Sumer, and Egypt. What this clearly indicates (these widespread linguistic ties and shared mythological traditions) is that the deepest roots of these traditions and languages trace back in time to a point when all of these people were, at one time, part of the same tribe. Over millennia, this tribe grew,

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