Vritra is the supreme enemy of the Rig Veda. His name comes from a Sanskrit root meaning “to cover, to obstruct.” He holds back the waters, prevents the rivers from flowing, blocks the rain that would make the harvests grow. His most frequent form is that of a serpent lying at the bottom of a cavern, accumulating in his belly the waters that life demands. Indra kills him with a thunderbolt and the waters begin to flow again. This myth is perhaps three thousand five hundred years old. And yet, when I read it, I think of tax havens.
What Vritra does in the myth, our financial oligarchies do in the real world: they capture, accumulate, retain. Serious estimates place between ten and thirty trillion dollars the sums subtracted from global economic circulation by tax havens. These sums do not circulate. They do not fund hospitals, schools, roads, energy transitions. They sit in the belly of Vritra — in opaque structures designed precisely to block the flow. The waters are held back. The rivers no longer run. The rain does not fall on the fields.
The civilization of the 7 Rivers had a radically opposite vision of the world. Archaeology shows us a society without visible hierarchical structures, without a sovereign’s palace, without a royal treasury. Wealth circulated — Afghan lapis lazuli, Gujarati carnelian, Omani copper — through vast exchange networks spanning thousands of kilometres. No one held back. Flow was the rule; blocked accumulation was the exception. Vritra was not an ideal of success: he was the monster to be slain.
What is striking in the Rig Veda is that Vritra is always described as someone who retains what belongs to all. The waters do not belong to him: they belong to the rivers, to men, to the harvests, to the gods. He has captured and sequestered them. And Vritra’s crime is not his power — he is described as a formidable being, “like a mountain firm on its base, with a thousand protectors” — but his refusal to let circulate what must circulate. This is exactly the definition of a tax haven: a powerful, well-guarded construction whose sole function is to stop the movement of what should reach everyone.
The civilization of the 7 Rivers did not know accumulation as a value. In a world of cyclical time — seasons, sacrifices, redistribution — hoarding wealth made no sense. One offered at the sacrifice, one redistributed, one maintained the flow. The archaeology of the Indus civilization shows no royal treasury, no tomb overloaded with offerings, no spectacular concentration of goods. What one finds is a remarkable equalization of conditions — workers’ houses have bathrooms at a time when even the great cities of Mesopotamia reserved such amenities for the elite.
What Vritra represents, in its most contemporary reading, is extraction without return: the capacity to take from a common system — infrastructure, natural resources, human labour — without ever giving back, without ever allowing circulation. Tax havens create nothing. They hold back. And like Vritra, they do this from very well-guarded caverns, with thousands of legal, accounting and political protectors.
The Vedic myth says that the only answer to Vritra is the thunderbolt of Indra — lucid intelligence, truth named, light brought to what is hidden. In our contemporary world, this thunderbolt may have a name: transparency, public registers of beneficial owners, OECD initiatives on base erosion, journalists who pierce the caverns — the Panama Papers, the Pandora Papers. Each time a cavern of Vritra is opened and the waters begin to flow again, the myth of the Rig Veda fulfils itself once more.
