The Aśvins are among the most frequently invoked deities in the Rig Veda. Their name means “resembling a Horse” — and in the symbolic reading I follow, drawing on Sri Aurobindo, the Horse is Force. They are twin gods, also called Angiras in the hymns. They are the brothers of the Dawn. They are the rising of the Sun, including within ourselves. In other words: Illumination.
Before exploring their healing dimension, I want to dwell on this image of sunrise. In the interior cosmology of the Rig Veda, the Dawn (Uṣas) precedes every manifestation of Light within us. The seers were not interested in the astronomical sun — they were interested in the return to Truth, to ṛta, after the darkness of ignorance. The Aśvins always arrive at dawn, with their chariot swift as thought, and they bring healing because healing, at its root, is a return to inner light.
Dasrā and Nāsatyā
The hymns give them two proper names: Dasrā and Nāsatyā. The first evokes “those who accomplish wonders,” the second “the truthful ones,” those who do not deceive. This pair of names captures their double nature: the power of the miraculous act, and fidelity to Truth. Here, as everywhere in the Rig Veda, we find the same fundamental tension between ṛta — Reality — and whatever strays from it.
The hymns dedicated to them are numerous. I have counted entire series across the central mandalas — hymns 419–420, 467–468, 471–472, 731–732, 747–748, 751–752, 755–756, 759–760, 763–764. This gives some measure of the importance the Vedic poets accorded them. By way of comparison, I examine another fundamental dyad of the Vedic pantheon in my article on Mitra and Varuṇa, the pair who guarantee pacts — but the Aśvins appear even more frequently throughout the corpus.
The miracles of healing
What strikes me in these hymns is the profusion of concrete acts. The Aśvins heal the blind, restore the lame, rejuvenate the old, return fertility. Several narratives recur.
The most celebrated is that of Bhujyu. His father Tugra had “abandoned him in the cloud of the Waters” — meaning left him to die at sea. The Aśvins intervene with their chariot swift as an arrow and bring him back unharmed. I read this symbolically as the rescue of the soul lost in the waters of unconsciousness — but the story also works literally, as a perilous sea crossing from which one escapes through divine intervention.
Another episode moved me more deeply: that of the sage Atri. The hymn says: “You freed the sage Atri, honoured by the five peoples, from the abyss of anguish.” The abyss of anguish — gabhīra in Vedic Sanskrit — is something deep, psychological. It is not merely a bodily ailment; it is an inner suffering from which the Aśvins wrench the sage free. The mental dimension of healing is already present, at the very heart of the oldest text we possess.
Medicine as inheritance
This link between the Aśvins and healing is no accident. My text mentions the three doshas of Ayurvedic medicine — Vāta, Pitta, Kapha — as one of the conceptual legacies of Vedic thought. Ayurveda, whose name means “science of life,” organized into a medical system what the Rig Veda expressed through prayer and myth.
I do not want to force the connection into a direct, mechanical genealogy: the Rig Veda is not a medical treatise. But it is clear that the culture that produced these hymns already thought about healing in a holistic way — body, mind, relationship to cosmic forces. Rudra himself, the god of storm and destruction, is invoked in a hymn for “the relief of suffering of all bipeds and quadrupeds.” The concern for the health of all living beings is inscribed at the heart of the text.
Arriving at dawn, drinking the soma
The Aśvins always arrive at dawn. It is the hour of sacrifice, the hour of soma. One hymn invites them: “Awaken the Ashvins together in the morning. Let them come here to drink the soma.” Another specifies: “The beloved Dawn shines again in the Sky. I celebrate the Ashvins with a hymn.”
This association is not incidental. Soma, in my reading, is not a drug or an ordinary plant — it is the means of reaching Illumination, of touching ṛta. The Aśvins, brothers of the Dawn and masters of healing, participate in the same movement: they are the forces within us that bring us back toward the Light when we are lost in illness, anguish or ignorance. I discuss this in more detail in my general article on what the Rig Veda does not contain, where I explain how Vedic gods are interior forces rather than external figures to be appeased.
A hymn of disarming humility
I will close with this verse that stopped me during my translation: “O Ashvins, what invocation leads to prosperity? What brings you satisfaction? How can the ignorant honour you?”
It is the poet himself questioning his own capacity to reach the gods. “Thus the ignorant may ask what you know, for no one knows better than you. Least of all a mortal without spirit.” Here is a spirituality that makes no claim to certainty, that begins with the humility of the seeker. This stance seems to me closer to philosophy than to religion as we ordinarily understand it. It is one of the reasons the Rig Veda has been my companion for decades.
Vedic medicine begins, above all, with this: acknowledging that we do not know, calling upon the forces of light, and letting them arrive at dawn.
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