Atharvaveda - Supreme Healing of Humanity.

The Atharvaveda (Sanskrit: अथर्ववेद, Atharvaveda from atharvāṇas and veda meaning "knowledge") is the "knowledge storehouse of atharvāṇas, the procedures for everyday life".^[1] The text is the fourth Veda, but has been a late addition to the Vedic scriptures of Hinduism.^[2][3]

The Atharvaveda is composed in Vedic Sanskrit, and it is a collection of 730 hymns with about 6,000 mantras, divided into 20 books.^[4] About a sixth of the Atharvaveda text adapts verses from the Rigveda, and except for Books 15 and 16, the text is in poem form deploying a diversity of Vedic meters.^[4] Two different recensions of the text – the Paippalāda and the Śaunakīya – have survived into modern times.^[5] Reliable manuscripts of the Paippalada edition were believed to have been lost, but a well-preserved version was discovered among a collection of palm leaf manuscripts in Odisha in 1957.^[5]

The Atharvaveda is sometimes called the "Veda of magical formulas",^[1] an epithet declared to be incorrect by other scholars.^[6] The Samhita layer of the text likely represents a developing 2nd millennium BCE tradition of magico-religious rites to address superstitious anxiety, spells to remove maladies believed to be caused by demons, and herbs- and nature-derived potions as medicine.^[7] Many books of the Atharvaveda Samhita are dedicated to rituals without magic and to theosophy.^[6] The text, states Kenneth Zysk, is one of oldest surviving record of the evolutionary practices in religious medicine and reveals the "earliest forms of folk healing of Indo-European antiquity".^[8]