The Sanskrit Mirror
How the Vedic and Zoroastrian Traditions Emerged from the Same Source — and What Their Divergence Reveals
The same civilization produced the Rigveda and the Gathas. They are not two traditions that happened to share vocabulary. They are two branches of a single tree, diverged before recorded history, still recognizable as kin in every hymn, every deity, every cosmological principle. The inversion between them is not religious difference. It is a schism within one family — and understanding what caused it changes everything about how we read both.
In the first essay of this series, we recovered the names of the Zoroastrian rulers who shaped the ancient world and reclaimed the spiritual ethos their names encoded. This essay goes deeper: to the root from which both the Zoroastrian and Vedic traditions grew, the moment of their divergence, and what that divergence actually meant.
The argument is simple but consequential. Avestan — the language of the Zoroastrian Gathas — and Vedic Sanskrit are not merely related languages in the way that French and Spanish are related. They are dialects of a common ancestral tongue so recent that their theological vocabularies are almost identical. The same words describe the cosmic order. The same figures appear in the pantheon. The same rituals are performed. And then — at a moment we can place roughly between 1500 and 1200 BCE — something happened that inverted the entire cosmological taxonomy. What one branch called divine, the other called demonic. What one branch called demonic, the other called divine.
Understanding that inversion is the key to understanding the entire history of Indo-Iranian religion. And it is the key to understanding how a shared intellectual inheritance was taxonomized into separate, competing traditions by colonial scholarship in a way that served colonial interests.
I. The Cognate Table — The Shared Vocabulary of the Divine
The following table is the forensic exhibit. Every pair of terms below existed in a common Proto-Indo-Iranian ancestral language before the Vedic and Avestan branches diverged. The shared root column shows the common ancestor. What changed was not the vocabulary — it was the cosmological valence assigned to that vocabulary.
| Avestan Term | Sanskrit Cognate | Shared Root | Zoroastrian Meaning | Vedic Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Asha | Rta ̥ | *H₂r̥tʰós | Cosmic truth-order; the way reality is when undistorted | Cosmic order; the principle governing ritual, natural law, moral action |
| Druj | Anrta | *H₂n̥-r̥tʰós | The Lie; cosmic falsehood; principle of distortion | Untruth; violation of Rta; ritual and moral disorder |
| Ahura | Asura | *H₂súros | Supreme divine being (Ahura Mazda = Lord of Wisdom) | Originally: powerful divine being (Varuna = Asura Mahat). Later: demon |
| Daeva | Deva | *deywós | Demon; being of chaos and Druj | Divine being; god; the thirty-three primary deities |
| Haoma | Soma | *sauma- | Sacred plant and its pressed juice; ritual offering; the divine drink | Sacred plant and its pressed juice; ritual offering; the divine drink |
| Atar | Agni | *(H₁)ngʷnis | Sacred fire; the divine messenger between humans and Ahura Mazda | God of fire; the divine messenger between humans and the devas |
| Mithra | Mitra | *mi-tró- | Yazata of covenants, contracts, and the rising sun | Vedic deity of covenants, friendship, and the sun |
| Gatha | Gita / Gatha | *gʷʰeh₂- | Sacred hymn composed by Zarathushtra | Sacred song; also preserved in Bhagavad Gita (the ‘Song’) |
| Saoshyant | Savitri / Savitr | *seu̥- | Future world-savior who brings Frashokereti | The solar deity as vivifier, life-giver, bringer of the new age |
| Yazata | Deva (early) | *yaj- | Divine being worthy of worship; angelic entity | Deity worthy of worship; the honored ones |
| Maga / Magi | Maga Brahmin | *magh- | Priestly class; those who tend the sacred fire | Solar priests in northwestern India; preserved in Surya worship |
| Fravashi | Pitri / Atman | *prʰ- | Divine essence; guardian spirit of the living and dead | Ancestral spirit; the true self that persists across lives |
| Spenta | Shvanta / Svanta | *sụen-to- | Beneficent, holy; Spenta Mainyu = the Beneficent Spirit | Auspicious, blessed; later: Su- prefix meaning good/auspicious |
| Angra | Anghas / Agha | *h₂engʷʰos | Hostile, destructive; Angra Mainyu = the Hostile Spirit | Sin, evil, narrowness; also: the Angirases (priestly clan) |
Read this table slowly. Every row is a civilization talking to itself in two dialects. The words are the same. The realities they point to are sometimes the same (Haoma/Soma, Mithra/Mitra, Gatha/Gita), sometimes inverted (Ahura/Asura, Daeva/Deva), and sometimes diverged into different conceptual territories from a common root (Asha/Rta, Angra/Anghas).
The inversion of Ahura/Asura and Daeva/Deva is not a minor lexical curiosity. It is the most consequential theological event in the history of Indo-Iranian religion, and possibly in the history of religion altogether. It requires its own section.
II. The Great Inversion — Asura / Ahura, Deva / Daeva
In the earliest Rigveda, Varuna is called Asura Mahat — the Great Asura. He is not a demon. He is the supreme guardian of cosmic order, the all-seeing keeper of Rta, the most morally elevated figure in the Vedic pantheon. The same title — Asura — that the Vedic tradition would later use for its most dangerous demons is the title given to its greatest god in its oldest hymns. Something happened between those two moments. That something is the key to everything.
The following table documents the inversion systematically. These are not separate figures from separate traditions. These are the same figures, named in the same ancestral language, with their cosmological status reversed between the two branches.
| Figure / Term | Vedic Status | Zoroastrian Status | What This Tells Us |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asura (title) | Originally: the highest divine title. Varuna = Asura Mahat (Great Asura). A mark of supreme divine authority. | Ahura = the supreme being. Ahura Mazda = Asura of Wisdom. The title is preserved and elevated. | The Zoroastrian branch preserved the original Indo-Iranian meaning. The Vedic branch underwent an inversion. |
| Varuna / *Ahura Varuna | Supreme guardian of Rta; all-seeing; moral lawgiver; most elevated early Vedic deity. Later demoted, eclipsed by Indra. | No direct Vedic equivalent survives, but Ahura Mazda carries all of Varuna’s attributes: all-seeing, guardian of Asha, moral sovereign. | Varuna’s demotion in Vedic tradition tracks the Asura inversion. The figure who became Ahura Mazda was marginalized on the Indian side. |
| Indra | Champion of the Devas; slayer of Vrtra; king of the gods; the dominant figure of the Rigveda’s martial hymns. | Daeva; a demonic figure. Indra specifically named as a Daeva in Zoroastrian texts — one of the hostile spirits to be rejected. | The Vedic tradition’s greatest hero is the Zoroastrian tradition’s greatest demon. This is not metaphor. It is the inversion in its starkest form. |
| Deva (class) | The gods; divine beings; thirty-three primary deities; the ones who receive soma offerings; the cosmic order’s guardians. | Daeva; demonic beings; servants of Angra Mainyu; the cosmic order’s destroyers; the ones Zarathushtra explicitly rejected. | The entire class of Vedic gods becomes the entire class of Zoroastrian demons. Not some overlap. Total inversion. |
| Mithra / Mitra | Minor Vedic deity of contracts and friendship; appears paired with Varuna; associated with the sun. | Major Zoroastrian Yazata; deity of covenants, the sun, and cosmic order; later becomes the center of the Mithraic mystery cult. | Mitra’s relative marginalization in Vedic tradition vs. his centrality in Zoroastrian tradition suggests his theological home was with the Iranian branch. |
| Haoma / Soma | The sacred plant of the Vedic ritual; associated with Indra and the Devas; the divine drink that grants immortality and vision. | The sacred plant of Zoroastrian ritual; associated with Ahura Mazda; the divine drink that sustains Asha. Zarathushtra initially critiques its misuse. | The plant itself survived the schism intact. Both branches kept it. What changed was the cosmological framework within which it was used. |
| Vrtra | The cosmic serpent / dragon slain by Indra; the obstacle to the cosmic waters; the principle of blockage and stagnation. | No direct Zoroastrian equivalent, but Angra Mainyu carries Vrtra’s function as cosmic adversary. Azi Dahaka (the serpent) is the Shahnameh’s version. | The cosmic adversary figure is preserved in both traditions but differently named. The Vedic tradition’s villain (Vrtra) is slain by a figure the Zoroastrian tradition made a demon (Indra). |
The inversion is total, systematic, and structurally coherent. This is not the result of cultural drift or gradual linguistic change. Someone — or some community — made a deliberate decision to reclassify the cosmological order. The question is who, and why.
III. The Priestly Schism — Bhrigus and Angirases
The answer, recoverable from textual and archaeological evidence, points to a schism within the Indo-Iranian priestly class. Two lineages of ritual specialists — the Bhrigus and the Angirases — held different cosmological allegiances that were already in tension within the common Indo-Iranian tradition before the split.
The Bhrigus
The Bhrigu clan are associated in Vedic tradition with fire — specifically with Agni as the divine messenger, and with the transmission of sacred fire knowledge from the divine to the human. The name Bhrigu is cognate with the Latin flagrare (to burn) and the Greek phlox (flame). They are the fire-keepers.
Crucially, Bhrigu mythology consistently positions them in relationship with the Asura world. The Bhrigu sage Shukra becomes the preceptor of the Asuras in Puranic mythology. The Bhrigu sage Jamadagni has fraught relationships with royal power. The Bhrigus are the priestly lineage that maintained the closest theological relationship with the Ahura/Asura divine class — the same class that Zarathushtra would systematically elevate.
The current scholarly hypothesis: the Zoroastrian reform was carried out by a Bhrigu-lineage priestly community that crossed the Hindu Kush into the Iranian plateau, where they became the Magi — the priestly class of the Zoroastrian tradition. Their theological preference for Ahura/Asura over the Indra-class Devas became Zarathushtra’s cosmological program.
The Angirases
The Angiras clan represents the opposing priestly lineage. They are the composers of the largest number of Rigvedic hymns. Their patron deity is Indra — the champion of the Devas, the soma-drinking warrior god, the slayer of Vrtra. The Angirases are the Indra-priests, the soma-ritual specialists, the keepers of the martial-celestial divine order.
As the Bhrigu-lineage communities migrated westward and became Zoroastrian, the Angiras-lineage communities consolidated their position in the Indian subcontinent. Their cosmological taxonomy — Devas as divine, Asuras as demonic — became the dominant Vedic framework. The Bhrigu perspective — Asuras as the supreme divine class, Devas as the problematic ones — was preserved only in fragmentary Vedic references and, fully, in the Avesta.
The Deva-Asura inversion is not a mystery of ancient religion. It is a record of a priestly civil war. Two lineages of the same tradition disagreed about which divine class held cosmic authority. One lineage took their theology west and built Zoroastrianism. The other lineage stayed east and built the Vedic mainstream. History recorded the winner’s taxonomy as ‘Hinduism’ and the loser’s as ‘fire-worship.‘
IV. Varuna — The God Who Should Have Been Ahura Mazda
No figure in the Vedic tradition illuminates the inversion more clearly than Varuna. In the oldest Rigvedic hymns, Varuna is the supreme moral sovereign of the cosmos. His attributes map onto Ahura Mazda with a precision that cannot be coincidental:
| Varuna in the Rigveda | Ahura Mazda in the Gathas |
|---|---|
| Called Asura Mahat — the Great Asura | Name means Ahura (Asura) of Wisdom — the Wise Lord |
| All-seeing; his spies are everywhere; nothing is hidden from him | All-knowing; omniscient; perceives every thought and action |
| Guardian of Rta — cosmic moral order | Guardian of Asha — cosmic truth-order (cognate term) |
| Punishes violation of Rta with disease and binding | Punishes alignment with Druj (the Lie) through cosmic consequence |
| Associated with the night sky, the stars, the cosmic ocean (Apas) | Associated with the cosmic fire, the light of truth, the celestial order |
| His relationship with Mitra as paired deity: cosmic order and covenant | His relationship with Mithra as Yazata: cosmic order and covenant |
| Gradually demoted in Vedic tradition; replaced by Indra as king of gods | Central and supreme throughout Zoroastrian tradition; never displaced |
| Becomes god of waters and oaths; his cosmic sovereignty forgotten | Remains the supreme Wise Lord; the entire tradition organized around him |
Varuna’s trajectory in the Vedic tradition is the Bhrigu-Angiras schism recorded in theological form. As the Indra-centered, soma-ritual, martial cosmology of the Angirases became dominant, the Varuna-centered, Asha/Rta-guardianship, cosmic-moral cosmology of the Bhrigus was marginalized. Varuna was demoted from cosmic sovereign to god of waters. His great hymns — among the most philosophically elevated passages in the Rigveda — became liturgical curiosities rather than the center of the tradition.
On the Iranian side, Varuna was not demoted. He was developed. The Bhrigu-lineage communities who carried his theology westward gave him a new name — or rather gave new prominence to one of his titles: Ahura, the Lord. They elevated his attribute of wisdom to a proper name: Mazda. And they built an entire civilization around the cosmological framework he represented.
Ahura Mazda and Varuna are not “similar.” They are the same theological figure seen through two traditions’ subsequent history. One tradition marginalized him. The other built the world’s first multicultural empire in his name.
V. The Sacred Plant at the Center of the Schism
Both traditions kept Haoma/Soma. This is the most important fact about the schism that almost no one discusses.
If the inversion were simply a theological disagreement about which class of beings held cosmic authority, we would expect the two branches to diverge in their ritual practices. Instead, both the Vedic and Zoroastrian traditions maintained the central ritual of pressing and consuming the sacred plant. The Vedic tradition called it Soma. The Avestan tradition called it Haoma. The ritual structure, the hymns of praise, the association with divine vision and cosmic truth — all preserved on both sides of the schism.
Zarathushtra’s Gathas contain a passage where he critiques the misuse of Haoma — not the plant itself, but the way it was being used by what appear to be the proto-Vedic priestly communities he was distinguishing himself from. His objection is not to consciousness alteration per se. His objection is to using the sacred plant in service of the wrong cosmological framework — in service of the Daevas rather than Ahura Mazda.
This is a remarkable detail. The schism was not about whether to use the plant. It was about which cosmological framework the plant’s revelations belonged to.
The Pharmacological Hypothesis
A hypothesis that deserves serious scholarly attention: the Deva-Asura inversion may encode a distinction between different categories of psychoactive experience.
Soma/Haoma — the sacred plant whose identity remains contested but whose effects the hymns describe as producing clarity, illumination, cosmic vision, and connection to divine order — maps phenomenologically onto serotonergic substances. The experiential qualities: luminous clarity, dissolution of boundaries, encounter with benevolent intelligence, the sense of perceiving cosmic order directly. These are consistent with serotonergic (5-HT2A agonist) phenomenology.
Datura (Dhatura in Sanskrit) — a plant deeply embedded in both Vedic and Zoroastrian adjacent traditions, associated with Shiva and with transgressive ritual practices, whose active compounds are tropane alkaloids (anticholinergics) — produces a categorically different experiential profile: delirium, encounter with malevolent entities, loss of temporal coherence, the sense of inhabiting a reality populated by threatening presences.
The Deva-Asura split may be a record of two different plant technologies producing two different categories of divine encounter — and two priestly lineages building their cosmologies around what they found on the other side of those encounters. The serotonergic tradition built a cosmos of luminous divine order. The anticholinergic tradition encountered something darker. The theological taxonomy encoded the pharmacological difference.
This hypothesis does not require that every Vedic or Zoroastrian priest was regularly consuming psychoactive substances. It requires only that the foundational visionary experiences that shaped both traditions’ cosmological vocabularies were influenced by which plant technologies the originating communities used — and that the theological inversion between Devas and Daevas, Asuras and Ahuras, encodes a real experiential difference that the priestly lineages were navigating.
The pharmacological hypothesis is not reductive. It does not say: “these traditions are just about drugs.” It says: consciousness technology shaped cosmology, and the schism between two traditions that share everything else — language, ritual structure, social organization, mythology — may have originated in what the two branches encountered in their most fundamental altered states.
VI. The Vedic Figures Who Mirror the Zoroastrian
Having established the shared substrate and the inversion, we can now trace specific Vedic figures who are the Sanskrit mirrors of the Zoroastrian tradition — figures who illuminate the common root by their parallels and their divergences.
Varuna and Ahura Mazda — Already Established Above
The supreme moral sovereign of the cosmos. The guardian of truth-order. The all-seeing lord. One tradition demoted him. The other built an empire in his name.
Agni and Atar — Fire as Cosmic Principle
Both traditions preserved the sacred fire with absolute centrality. Vedic Agni is not merely a deity of the hearth — he is the divine messenger, the priest among the gods, the one who carries offerings between the human and divine realms. His Sanskrit name (cognate with Latin ignis) is the same root as Avestan Atar.
The Zoroastrian Atash Behram — the highest grade of sacred fire, consecrated through a ritual requiring sixteen different categories of fire including fire from a lightning strike, fire from a funeral pyre, fire from the forge of a metalworker — is a theology of fire’s omnipresence. Fire is everywhere. It is in the forest, in the forge, in the kitchen, in the funeral pyre. The sacred fire is the recognition that all of these are one fire — one Asha, one truth-principle, manifesting everywhere.
Vedic Agni carries the same theology in different form. He is described as dwelling in every hearth, every lightning strike, every digestive fire within the body. He is universal. He is the divine presence accessible everywhere, the bridge between the human world and the cosmic order, because he is already in both.
Mitra and Mithra — The Covenant Deity
Among all the cognate figures, Mitra/Mithra shows the divergence between the two traditions most clearly. In the Rigveda, Mitra is consistently paired with Varuna — they are the twin guardians of Rta, the cosmic overseers of covenants and moral order. But in the Rigveda, Mitra is the minor partner. He receives fewer hymns, carries less narrative weight, functions primarily as Varuna’s complement.
In the Avestan tradition, Mithra is a major Yazata — a being worthy of worship in his own right — with an entire Yasht (hymn collection) devoted to him. He is the guardian of contracts, the deity whose gaze misses nothing, the one who witnesses every oath and punishes every violation. He becomes so important that his cult spreads westward throughout the Roman Empire as Mithraism — a mystery religion that competes directly with early Christianity.
The trajectory mirrors Varuna’s: the figures associated with the Bhrigu-lineage cosmology were marginalized in the Vedic tradition that the Angirases shaped, and developed into major theological figures in the Zoroastrian tradition that the Bhrigu-lineage communities built on the Iranian plateau.
The Rishis and the Magi
The Vedic rishi tradition and the Zoroastrian Magi tradition are structurally identical: priestly specialists who compose sacred hymns, tend sacred fire, perform ritual sacrifice, interpret celestial signs, and transmit theological knowledge through initiatory lineages. The word Magi — which entered English as “magic”, a derogatory Greek reduction of a Zoroastrian priestly title — is cognate with the Sanskrit word magh-, meaning powerful, wealthy, or gifted.
The Maga Brahmins of northwestern India — a priestly community documented in Sanskrit texts as solar worshippers with distinct ritual practices, traditionally said to have come from Iran — may represent a community that maintained connections to the Iranian Magi tradition even after the main split. They are the historical trace of the moment when the branches were still in contact.
VII. The Nasadiya Sukta — The Pre-Schism Theology
Before the inversion. Before the Bhrigu-Angiras conflict. Before Zarathushtra’s reform and the Indra-centered Vedic consolidation. There is a hymn in the tenth book of the Rigveda that encodes what both traditions knew before they diverged.
The Nasadiya Sukta — Rigveda 10.129 — is the Creation Hymn. It is also, arguably, the most philosophically sophisticated pre-philosophical text in the world.
Nāsad āsīn no sad āsīt tadānīm
Neither being nor non-being existed then
The hymn continues: there was no air, no sky, no death, no immortality, no day, no night. Only That One thing, breathing without breath, by its own nature. Nothing else.
This is not the theology of the Indra hymns. This is not the theology of the soma-warrior-cattle-raiding Vedic religion that Western scholarship has primarily focused on. This is non-dual cosmology of the highest order — a vision of reality before differentiation, before the Deva-Asura split, before the theological inversions and priestly schisms that would follow.
The Nasadiya Sukta is the common ground that both the Vedic and Zoroastrian traditions were departing from. Zarathushtra’s Asha and the Vedic Rta are both attempts to describe the order that the Nasadiya Sukta’s “That One” spontaneously generates when it differentiates into experience. The Deva-Asura inversion is a downstream dispute about how to navigate that differentiated world. The undivided source — the primordial non-dual reality — was the shared inheritance both traditions were working from.
The Nasadiya Sukta is the photograph of the civilization before the schism. Everything that followed — the Vedic tradition, the Zoroastrian tradition, and ultimately the Abrahamic traditions that inherited Zoroastrian ideas — are attempts to elaborate what that undivided One means in a world of multiplicity, conflict, and death. Zarathushtra’s answer was Asha. The Vedic answer was Rta. They are the same answer in two languages.
VIII. What Colonial Taxonomy Did to This History
The colonial scholarship that shaped Western understanding of Indian and Iranian religion in the nineteenth century had both a methodological and an ideological problem with what we have traced above.
Methodologically: comparative religion as a discipline was being built precisely by scholars like Max Müller, who were trained in the Romantic nationalist tradition and who approached Indian texts as evidence for the “Aryan” origins of European civilization. Their comparative work was genuine scholarship. But it was framed by a preoccupation with demonstrating the Indo-European linguistic family and situating Sanskrit as the “mother tongue” of civilization in a way that served nineteenth-century European self-narration.
Ideologically: the recovery of the Vedic-Zoroastrian shared substrate had implications that colonial scholarship had no interest in developing. If Zoroastrian theology substantially shaped the post-exilic Judaism that gave rise to Christianity — if the Satan of Christian theology, the heaven and hell of Christian afterlife doctrine, the resurrection of the body at the center of Christian soteriology, all originate in the Gathas composed by a pastoral prophet on the Iranian plateau — then the intellectual genealogy of Western civilization runs through Iran, not through Athens and Jerusalem alone.
That genealogy was inconvenient. It was not suppressed through conspiracy. It was suppressed through selective emphasis: treating the Vedic-Zoroastrian cognate relationship as a linguistic curiosity rather than a theological genealogy; treating Zoroastrianism as a “minor” tradition that ‘influenced’ Judaism in passing rather than as the architectural source of its post-exilic metaphysics; treating the Deva-Asura inversion as a puzzle in comparative mythology rather than as the key to understanding how Western civilization’s moral architecture was built.
The decolonial recovery of the Sanskrit mirror is not anti-Western. It is anti-amnesia. It asks: what does Western civilization look like when you trace its intellectual genealogy honestly, without the selection bias that privileges Greek and Abrahamic sources over Indo-Iranian ones?
The answer is: it looks like it was built on foundations that the Indo-Iranian world laid, that a pastoral prophet named Zaraθuštra systematized, that a Zoroastrian king named Kurush transmitted to a Jewish community in Babylonian exile, that post-exilic Judaism absorbed and developed, that Christianity and Islam inherited — and that the tradition at the beginning of that chain is now a minority religion of approximately 120,000 people, mostly in Mumbai and Gujarat, trying to preserve sacred fires that have been burning continuously for over a thousand years.
IX. What the Indic Tradition Preserved That Zoroastrianism Lost
The schism was not a one-way loss. The Zoroastrian tradition’s dualistic sharpening — the clear polarity between Asha and Druj, the cosmic moral battle, the ethical clarity of Humata Hukhta Hvarshta — produced one of the world’s most coherent ethical monotheisms. But it came at a cost: the non-dual substrate of the Nasadiya Sukta was bracketed. The question of what existed before Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, before the cosmic separation of Asha and Druj, was not Zarathushtra’s theological project.
The Vedic tradition, for all its subsequent complications, preserved that non-dual substrate and developed it. The Upanishads — composed between 800 and 200 BCE, the philosophical elaboration of the Vedic tradition — return directly to the Nasadiya Sukta’s non-dual vision: Brahman alone is real; Atman is Brahman; Tat Tvam Asi — You Are That. The multiplicity of the Vedic pantheon is ultimately the One appearing as many.
This is the Indo-Aryan substrate completing its own philosophical arc. The pre-schism non-dualism of the Nasadiya Sukta becomes the post-Vedic non-dualism of Advaita Vedanta. The Deva-Asura inversion — the cosmic dualism that entered through the schism — is ultimately reabsorbed into the non-dual vision from which both traditions emerged.
The Vedic-Zoroastrian schism, then, is not the whole story. It is the middle of a longer story, whose beginning is the Nasadiya Sukta’s undivided One and whose ending — in the third essay of this series — is Guru Nanak’s Ik Onkar: the return to non-dual vision having passed through every dualistic elaboration the Indo-Iranian tradition produced.
The Rigveda begins: ‘Neither being nor non-being existed.’ The Mool Mantar begins: Ik Onkar — One Reality. Three thousand years apart. The same insight. Everything in between is the tradition learning, through its own dualisms and inversions and reformations, why the beginning was right.
VK Singh Vashisht writes on film, religion, law, and late-stage capitalism at vksinghvashisht.com
Essay II of the series: The Erased Foundation — Recovering the Indo-Aryan Substrate of Western Civilization
Next: Essay III — Ik Onkar: How Guru Nanak Completed the Arc