The collection of Rigveda hymns itself aims to establish contact with the gods and, for a skillfully composed hymn, to receive the benefits that the deity is asked for. Such a model of the world is very far from modern man, and there is a temptation to “modernize” this text. The monograph discusses issues of methodology that allows one to correctly establish the connection between the lexical meaning of a word and the object or concept it denotes based on the text of archaic cult poetry. Analysis of a number of semantic fields (house, place of sacrifice, road, forest, field, water, mountain, fortress) using a complex transition - text grammar, mythology, poetics of the monument - allows us to establish a number of criteria that determine the functioning of synonyms in hymns, which is very different from situations in modern living languages. Contents:IntroductionHouseSacrificial community/place of sacrifice (vrjana-)Path-roadForest-treesField-meadow-pastureWaterMountain-rock-stoneFortress (pur-)ConclusionConclusionIndex of quotations from the Rigveda