The Rig Veda is the most ancient source we can draw from to try to understand what the nascent state of humanity was, – and to grasp the permanence of its dreams. Religion and society, then, were in a childhood that did not exclude a profound wisdom, more original than anything that antiquity could conceive of later, and of which Solomon himself was a distant heir.

For a long time unwritten, transmitted orally for millennia by pure thinkers and ascetics without fail, the memory of the Veda bears witness to a moment in humanity much older than the time of Abraham. When this prophet of the monotheism left Ur in Chaldea, around 1200 BC, for his exile to the North then to the South, many centuries had already passed over the Oxus valleys and the Indus basin. More than a millennium before Abraham, time had sedimented the deep memory of the Veda. Long before Abraham, Vedic priests celebrated the idea of a unique and universal deity. And Melchisedech himself, the oldest prophetic figure quoted in the Bible, is a partridge of the year, if we compare him to the obscure continuation of the times that preceded him, and which allowed his coming.

These ideas must be penetrated if we want to put an end to the drama of the exception and of history, and understand what humanity as a whole has been carrying within it from the beginning.

Man has always been possessed by an intuition of the Divine, and this intuition must be grasped by opening up to what remains of its origin. The Bible is a fairly recent document, and its price should not make us forget its relative youth. Its age goes back at most to a thousand years before our era. In contrast, the Veda is one or even two millennia older.

This is why I believe it is important to rely, even today, on the soul of the Veda, to try to understand the unity of the human adventure. And to sense its possible evolution – so much so that the past is one of the potential forms of the future.

To illustrate this point, I would like to propose a quick review of some of the images celebrated by the Veda, to show its universality and depth.

In ancient times, the melted butter (ghṛita) alone represented a kind of cosmic miracle. It embodied the cosmic alliance of the sun, nature and life: the sun, source of all life in nature, makes the grass grow, which nourishes the cow, which exudes its intimate juice, the milk, which becomes butter by the action of man (churning), and finally comes to flow freely as sôma on the altar of sacrifice to mingle with the sacred fire, to nourish the flame, to generate light, and to spread the odor capable of rising to the heavens, concluding the cycle. A simple and profound ceremony, originating in the mists of time, and already possessing the vision of the universal cohesion between the divine, the cosmos and the human.

“From the ocean, the wave of honey arose, with the sôma, it took on the form of ambrosia. This is the secret name of ‘Butter’, the language of the Gods, the navel of the immortal. (…) Arranged in three parts, the Gods discovered in the cow the Butter that the Paṇi had hidden. Indra gave birth to one of these parts, the Sun the second, the third was extracted from the wise man, and prepared by the rite. (…) They spring from the ocean of the Spirit, these streams of Butter a hundred times enclosed, invisible to the enemy. I consider them, the golden rod is in their midst. (…) They jump before Agni, beautiful and smiling like young women at the rendezvous; the streams of Butter caress the flaming logs, the Fire agrees with them, satisfied.”ⁱ

If one finds in ‘Butter’ connotations that are too domestic to be able to bear the presence of the sacred, it is thought that the Priests, Prophets and Kings of Israel, for example, did not fear being anointed with sacred oil, butter and chrism, the maximum concentration of meaning, where the product of the Cosmos, the work of men, and the life-giving power of God magically converge.

iṚgVéda IV,58