The Ancient Mother
Roughly three thousand years ago, somebody sat down and wrote sixty-three verses to the ground.
Not about the ground. To it. The Prithvi Sukta — the Hymn to the Earth, the twelfth book of the Atharva Veda — speaks to the earth the way a child speaks to a parent who is standing in the room. Second person, start to finish. Bear us. Feed us. Don’t let us stumble.
And a few pages earlier, in the same collection, there is a short list of plants said to deliver us from distress.
Hemp is on it.
Most sacred texts describe the world. This one talks to it, and the register is startlingly domestic. The hymn asks the earth to make room. It asks her not to let the singer trip while walking. It notices, in passing, that a person lies down on her at night and rolls from one side to the other, and it asks her not to mind.
That is not the language of worship at a distance. It is the language of someone who lives on top of something enormous and is on good terms with it.
Then the hymn states the relation outright, and it states it as descent.
Parjanya is the rain. So the arrangement the hymn describes is earth for a mother and weather for a father — which, for anyone who has ever run a garden, is less a metaphor than an accurate list of the inputs.
What matters is the direction of the claim. The singer does not own the earth, work the earth, or steward the earth. He is descended from her. Everything after that follows from the debt.
Elsewhere in the Atharva Veda, in a long prayer for deliverance from distress, the singer works through everything he can think of to call on — gods, rivers, seasons, constellations, the dead. Partway down he turns to the plants, and names five of them.
| Plant | What it is |
|---|---|
| Soma | lord of the five, the ritual draught |
| Darbha | the sacred grass, cut and laid for the altar |
| Bhaṅgā — hemp | rendered “hemp” by Griffith in 1895 |
| Yava — barley | the field crop, the everyday grain |
| Saha | “mighty power” — the enduring one |
The verse itself is four plain words in a row: “Darbha, hemp, barley, mighty power: may these deliver us from woe.”
It is worth sitting with how unremarkable that is. Cannabis is not crowned here. It is not the secret at the centre of anything. It is listed — between the grass they cut for the altar and the barley they ate — as one of five ordinary, useful, holy things.
That is a smaller claim than the one usually made about this verse, and it is a better one. A plant that has to be exalted is a plant somebody is selling you. A plant that turns up in an inventory beside altar grass and a cereal crop is a plant that was simply around, and was valued, and did not need explaining to anyone at the time.
The identification of bhaṅgā with cannabis is the traditional reading and the standard one — Ralph Griffith translated it as “hemp” in 1895, and most translators since have followed. It is not unanimous. A minority of Sanskritists have argued the word is less certain than the popular retelling assumes.
We think the traditional reading is the right one, and we are telling you it is a reading. The rest of this piece does not depend on it: the Hymn to the Earth stands on its own, and it is the older and larger idea.
Deep in the Hymn to the Earth there is a verse we did not expect to find, and it is the reason this episode exists.
Read the grammar of it. The scent does not belong to the herb. The scent has risen from the earth, and the growing plant is the thing that carries it up.
Three thousand years later, that is very close to how it actually works. Aroma in a cannabis plant is not a fixed property stamped into the seed. It is an expression — downstream of the soil it sits in, the water it gets, the light it receives, the temperature at night in its last three weeks. Anyone who has run the same cut in two different mediums has smelled two different plants and known it was one genotype.
We spend a great deal of our time on the nose. Rub scores, terpene notes, the argument about whether a pheno that reads flat on dry veg tissue will come back in flower. It is easy to talk about all of that as though the smell is something the plant has.
The hymn says the smell is something the plant is carrying. On the evidence, the hymn has the better of it.
There is one more verse, and it reads like it was written by someone with dirt on their hands.
That is not a devotional flourish. That is an operating constraint, stated by a person who intends to keep digging and intends the ground to still be there next year. Take, and take in a way that closes. Do not cut so deep that the thing cannot come back.
Every seed we put in an envelope is a version of that sentence. A cross only matters if it can be grown again by somebody who is not us.
We named this plant The Ancient Mother before we had read a word of the Atharva Veda. It came out of the same instinct the hymn came out of — that the ground is the older party in the arrangement, and that we are late to it.
Then we looked at what is actually in the plant.
The Ancient Mother is Block Knocker crossed onto Deep Chunk F14. The Deep Chunk side is Tom Hill’s line, an Afghani inbred at fourteen generations — pure hash expression, and about as close to the plant’s ancestral home as a modern seed gets. On the Block Knocker side, underneath four independent paths of OG Kush, sits Hindu Kush again, carried down through the SFV cut.
So the mountains turn up twice, on both sides of the cross. The hymn that calls the earth a mother was sung within reach of the same range that the landrace half of this plant comes down from.
Which leaves the name meaning three things at once, and we only intended one of them. The earth as the mother you are descended from. The landrace as the mother of every modern hybrid, including all the loud ones. And this particular plant’s own maternal line, running back toward ground that people were already singing to three thousand years ago.
Old souls, all of them. 👁