In Hinduism, Atharvan is a legendary sage and seer, and one of the Rishis, said to have composed the Atharvaveda.
In VedicSanskrit, an atharvan is a priest who has to do with fire and Soma (probably from an obsolete word athar for fire, cognate to Latinater "black").
It has often been connected with Avestan atar- "fire" (not attested in Vedic), but, according to Boyce (1982:16), such connections may "have been prompted by what is probably a mistaken assumption of the importance of fire in the ancient Indo-Iranian religion".
The compound atharvÄngiras of atharvan and angiras, either two eponymous rishis or family names, is the original name of the Atharvaveda as known to the other vedic practitioners.
The division of priestly functions among the Hotar, the Udgatar and the Adhvaryu is directly comparable to the Celtic priesthood as reported by Strabo, with the Druids as high priests, the Bards doing the chanting and the Vates performing the actual sacrifice.
He thinks that the concept of "deep ecology" discussed by physicist Fritjof Capra as a perception of reality going beyond the scientific framework to an intuitive awareness of oneness of all life came close to saga Atharvan's spiritual ecology.
Atharvan telescopes from a discussion of the whole planet to a survey of his immediate environs, paralleling the modern maxim "Think globally, act locally."
Raj Kumar Sen, an economist from Calcutta, harvested insights from the Arthashastra, a watershed political treatise written by a 3rd century BCE brahmin prime minister to guide the monarchy.
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