We tend to imagine the authors of the Rig Veda as an exclusively male assembly of meditating sages. What the text actually says is richer and more surprising: several women figure among the seers who “saw” the hymns. Lopāmudrā, Viśvāvārā ātreyī — their names are there, written in the hymn headers as full authors. I want to explore what this means for our understanding of the sacred feminine in the Vedic tradition.
The word rishi comes from a root meaning to see, in the sense of directly perceiving reality. A rishi does not invent a hymn: they receive it, they see it in a state of expanded consciousness. It is not a priestly function in the institutional sense — it is a capacity for perception. And this capacity, the Rig Veda explicitly recognizes in women. This is not a marginal detail. It is a structural datum of the oldest text in the tradition.
In Mandala 5, hymn 28, the name Viśvāvārā ātreyī appears as the rishi. She addresses Agni: “Well kindled, Agni has fixed his flame to the Sky. Facing the Dawn, he shines from afar.” The voice is assured, the vision direct. There is no difference in tone or form between this hymn and those signed by male rishis. Viśvāvārā sees Agni rising toward the sky like a dawn, she celebrates him as a “guest” who sits before us and gives. It is a full cosmic vision, expressed with the same metrical mastery as her male contemporaries.
But it is in Mandala 1, hymn 179, that I find something even more striking. Its rishi is Lopāmudrā, and the hymn is a dialogue with her husband Agastya. Lopāmudrā speaks first: “For many autumns I have grown weary, from morning to evening, through the Dawns that age us. Old age destroys the beauty of bodies. Let husbands now approach their wives.” A woman speaks of her desire, her aging body, her expectation. She is not the object of male desire: she is a speaking subject, who challenges, who asserts. And the Rig Veda places her in the rank of rishi — of one who sees.
This feminism is not ideological in the modern sense. It is structural and spiritual. If a woman can be a rishi, it is because the capacity for direct vision of reality is not tied to gender. The Vedic tradition, in its oldest layer, implicitly holds that access to the sacred is a matter of consciousness, not biology. This is a remarkable position for a text dating back at least three thousand five hundred years.
My translation of the Rig Veda also shows that in certain civilizations contemporary with the composition of the hymns — notably those of Central Asia — some cities were led by women, and that women fully participated in rituals, drank soma, and were not subject to any form of veiling. This social context illuminates the presence of female rishis: they were not scandalous exceptions in a patriarchal world, but normal figures in a world where the feminine had its place in the sacred space.
The tantric tradition, which claims inheritance from this Vedic antiquity, has preserved something of this spirit: tantric lineages pass from mistress to female disciple, preserving a chain of feminine teaching that later Brahmanical institutions progressively marginalized. But the source is there, in the Rig Veda itself.
What I take from this is that modernity sometimes searches in other traditions — Tibetan Buddhism, shamanism, indigenous spiritualities — for a place for the sacred feminine that the Vedic tradition had already made room for at its origin. Lopāmudrā and Viśvāvārā are not historical curiosities. They are spiritual ancestors whose presence in the most venerated corpus of the tradition challenges any discourse that would cast Vedism as a closed patriarchal religion. The text itself says something different.
I sometimes wonder how many other rishikās — the Sanskrit term for female seers — have been progressively erased over centuries of transmission. Those who remain visible in the text are perhaps the visible part of a larger feminine presence at the origin of this tradition.
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