OM agnim ile purohitam
yajnasya devam rtvijam
hotaram ratnadhatamam
I magnify God, the Divine Fire, the Priest, Minister of the sacrifice, the Offerer of oblation, supreme Giver of treasure.
RV I, 1, 1
We open this anthology with an invocation. To be able to invoke, that is, to call upon, something greater than ourselves and so break our own boundaries is the beginning of wisdom, the source of hope, and the condition of joy. Our first verse is the opening of the whole Vedic Revelation: the invocation to Agni, the mediator par excellence, the sacrifcial Fire, who transforms all material and human gifts into spiritual and divine realities, so that they may reach their endless destination. Agni has a priestly role and a threefold composition, his nature being the anthropocosmic (i.e., divine, human, and earthly at one and the same time). Or, in traditional Vedic terms, Agni has a threefold aspect: adhidaivika, adhyamika, and adhibhautika. This opening verse contains as in a nutshell the whole of Man’s sanatana dharma or primordial religiousness: praise, mediation, sacrifice, commerce with the divine, and also remuneration for Man, all caught up in an atmosphere of invocation. We invoke the divine--wherever it may be and however we may conceive it--not because we are lazy or unable to work out by ourselves the contents of our prayers, but because, filled with love, we sense within our selves a gulf between the finite and the infinite and simply open the sluices that enclose our finitude. The last sukta of the Rig Veda is also dedicated to Agni and with its last mantra we close our anthology.
Magnify: il- suggests a call, a request, an entreaty, praise.
The Divine Fire: Agni.
Cf. § III 4 for the entire hymn.