In the tenth book of the Rig Veda there is a hymn spoken in the first person by Vak, speech herself. She says she moves with the Rudras and the Adityas, that she supports Mitra and Varuna, that she is the one through whom anyone eats or sees or breathes, and that whoever she loves she makes powerful. Speech is not being described here. Speech is speaking, and what she claims is not that she conveys the gods but that she carries them.
Treating language as a deity rather than as a tool reverses the usual relation. A tool is picked up by a user who exists prior to it and has purposes of their own. If speech is a power in her own right, then a speaker is something that happens within language rather than something that operates it, and the accuracy of what is said stops being a matter of personal skill and becomes a matter of alignment with something that was already there.
This is the assumption underneath a great deal of what follows in the tradition. It explains why mantras are held to work by their sound rather than by their meaning, why the precision of Vedic recitation was guarded to the level of individual pitch, and why grammar became a discipline with soteriological stakes rather than a technical convenience. Vak is later identified with Saraswati, and the identification is not decorative: the goddess of learning is the same figure as the power of utterance, which is why Mantra Vidya treats sound as a science rather than a symbol system.
A tradition that made speech a goddess was always going to take words more seriously than one that made them a tool. To see how that seriousness became a discipline, explore more of The Living Sanatan Timeline.
Part 20 of 100 — Series I: From the Beginning
Series I: From the BeginningThe Five KoshasIndexFAQThe Timeline