This poem has usually been interpreted as a satire upon the Brahmans. If such be indeed its purport, we find it difficult to conceive how it could have gained admittance into a collection like the Rigveda, which, if not entirely composed, was certainly edited, by priests. The Brahmans cannot have been ignorant of the real significance of the poem. On the other hand, the comparison of frogs with Brahmans would not necessarily imply satire to the Vedic Indian. Students familiar with the style of the Rigveda know that many similes which, if used by ourselves, would involve contempt or ridicule, were employed by the ancient Indian poets only for the sake of graphic effect. As the frogs are in the last stanza besought to grant wealth and length of days, it is much more likely that we have here a panegyric of frogs believed to have the magical power of bringing rain.
There remain about twenty poems the subject-matter of which is of a more or less secular character. They deal with social customs, the liberality of patrons, ethical questions, riddles, and cosmogonic speculations. Several of them are of high importance for the history of Indian thought and civilisation. As social usages have always been dominated by religion in India, it is natural that the poems dealing with them should have a religious and mythological colouring. The most notable poem of this kind is the long wedding-hymn (x. 85) of forty-seven stanzas. Lacking in poetic unity, it consists of groups of verses relating to the marriage ceremonial loosely strung together. The opening stanzas (1–5), in which the identity of the celestial soma and of the moon is expressed in veiled terms, are followed by others (6–17) relating the myth of the wedding of Soma the moon with the sun-maiden Sūryā. The Açvins, elsewhere her spouses, here appear in the inferior capacity of groomsmen, who, on behalf of Soma, sue for the hand of Sūryā from her father, the sun-god. Savitṛi consents, and sends his daughter, a willing bride, to her husband’s house on a two-wheeled car made of the wood of the çalmali or silk-cotton tree, decked with red kiṃçuka flowers, and drawn by two white bulls.
Then sun and moon, the prototype of human marriage, are described as an inseparable pair (18–19):—
They move alternately with mystic power;
Like children playing they go round the sacrifice:
One of the two surveys all living beings,
The other, seasons meting out, is born again.
Ever anew, being born again, he rises,
He goes in front of dawns as daylight’s token.
He, coming, to the gods their share apportions: