Chapter VII: Preface (7)

In spite of all the angry and ill-natured words of M. Bergaigne, I ask once more whether this address to the Dawn is not perfectly natural and intelligible. Whether it required a priest to compose it, or whether any father of a family could have done so, who can tell? And who can tell whether the first priest was not simply the father of a family, who had his fire always burning on the domestic hearth, and who felt grateful for the return of the dawn, which coincided with the kindling of the fire on his hearth? If the morning service was called Pûrvahûti, what is that more than the early calling, Hûti being derived from the same root, Hvê, from which we had before Hot_ri_, the invoker, the priest.

But whatever we may think on that point, it seems perfectly clear that the different names by which the Dawn is here addressed, Ushas, Ahanâ, Dyotanâ, Dakshi_n_â, and Sûn_ri_tâ, were understood as names of the Dawn. But will it be believed, that when the Dawn is addressed in the very first verse by the name of Dakshi_n_â, when her chariot is mentioned, and her stepping forth out of darkness to come to the morning-prayer of the people, Mr. Bergaigne, always on the look-out for priest-craft and ritual, sees in Dakshi_n_â, not the Dawn, but _le salaire du sacrifice_? He thinks it not impossible that _le salaire du sacrifice_ might have been the name of the Dawn, _considérée comme le don céleste accordé pour récompense à l’homme pieux_. But he declines even this small concession, and, if I understand him rightly, he actually takes Dakshi_n_â in the first and fifth verses of our hymn as the salary of the priests. Now it is quite true that Dakshi_n_â has this meaning of salary or gift due to the priest who performs that sacrifice, but that meaning is clearly impossible here. Our hymn contains several unusual names of the Dawn, such as Ahanâ, Dyotanâ, Sûn_ri_tâ, all ἅπαξ λεγόμενα, as names of the Dawn, then why not Dakshi_n_â? Dakshi_n_â means right, _dexter_, evidently from Daksha, strength, the right hand being the strong or clever hand. It then means southern. It also means the cow, the strong cow which has calves and gives milk (Dakshi_n_â gâva_h_, Lâ_t_y. VIII, 5), and as such a cow was the most primitive payment (_fee_ and _pecu_), it may well have become the regular name for the fee due to the priest. She is celebrated as such in one of the Vedic hymns, X, 107. But however prominent a place may have been assigned to this Dakshi_n_â, the salary of priests, how could the Dawn have been called the salary? We can hardly explain why even that salary was called Dakshi_n_â, unless we suppose that it was meant for the right hand, or _la bonne main_, and in that case Dakshi_n_â, Dawn, might have been meant for the liberal goddess. But whatever the evolution of the meaning of Dakshi_n_â may have been[32], when she was invoked as Dakshi_n_â, she could not have been invoked as Salary. I am glad to see that even M. Bergaigne has not been bold enough to translate “_Le large char du Salaire a été attelé_,” but “_Le large char de la Dakshi_n_â_.” If Dakshi_n_â were really in that sense an ἅπαξ λεγόμενον, surely it is not the only ἅπαξ λεγόμενον in the scanty survivals of Vedic poetry. When we read that Dakshi_n_â was the daughter of Dyaus and the mother of Agni (Rig-Veda III, 58, 1), we need no more to feel convinced that she was meant for the Dawn. Besides, who is the Putro Dakshi_n_âya_h_, the son of Dakshi_n_â, if not Agni, the same who brings Dyotani, Rig-Veda III, 58, 1? Another name of the Dawn is Dyotanâ, and who can doubt that it meant the brilliant, i.e. the Dawn. More difficult are the other names Ahanâ and Sûn_ri_tâ.

Ahanâ is clearly connected with Ahan, day, just as our dawn is connected with day. It has long been known that day is not connected with _dies_, as was formerly supposed, but that the root of Goth. dags, day, can only have been dah, or dhah, with double aspirate, to burn, to shine. The loss of an initial d is no doubt quite irregular[33], though it can be matched by Goth. tagr, Gr. δάκρυ, tear, which in Sanskrit appears as A_s_ru, instead of Da_s_ru. I pointed out long ago, and I have never seen any valid reason to retract it, that in the Greek δάφνη, laurel tree, the name of a matutinal goddess, we have the root with its initial d, and that another derivation of the same root, without the initial d, may be recognised in Athanâ or Athênê.

No one, I thought, could have supposed that I meant to see in this Ahanâ one of the grandest Greek goddesses, Athênê. Why will people so often misunderstand, and then place their misunderstanding on the shoulders of those whom they misunderstand? When I said that Zeus is Dyaus, that Eos is Ushas, that Agni is Ignis, surely I could not have meant that these gods and goddesses migrated bodily from India to Greece and from Greece to India. Why must what seems perfectly clear be said again and again, that the Greek and Indian gods were not beings that ever existed in heaven or on earth, but were mere names, mere creations of the human mind. In all comparative mythological studies we have to look for the germs only, and I see in Ahanâ and Athênê a common germ, that withered on Indian soil, while it assumed the grandest development in Greece.

Surely not even Deva is the same as Deus; though it may be the same sound, it does not represent the same meaning, so that strictly speaking we cannot translate the one by the other. The Greek concept of Zeus also was very different from that of the Vedic Dyaus, as that of Eos from that of Ushas. I never went so far as to claim for Greek and Vedic deities what might be called personal or bodily identity. I was simply looking for germs which after thousands of years might have developed into a Sûrya in the Veda, and into a Helios in Homer. These very modest claims may possibly surprise my adversaries, for, to judge from their remarks, they evidently imagined that I recognised in Zeus a heavenly king who had migrated from India to Greece, and in the Haritas the horses of the morning who in their journey to Greece had been metamorphosed into the brilliant children of Helios and Aigle. I even begin to see why what some critics supposed to have been my idea, should have ruffled their temper so much, and I say once more, and I hope for the last time, that I never believed that Athênê lived in the thoughts of Vedic Rishis, nor Varu_n_a in the prayers of Greek priests. No, I am and always have been satisfied with far less. All I stand up for is that, given the sky, the Greeks raised Dyu, sky, to become their Zeus, while the Vedic Rishis made the sky their Dyaus. This Dyaus is superseded in the Veda by his own son, Indra, whereas Zeus in Greece remained to the end the θεῶν ὕπατος καὶ ἄριστος. What is common to both is the word, that is, the concept of Dyaus, or Greek Zeus, the sky as a person and as an agent. I may not always have spoken quite guardedly, and have taken certain things for granted which are understood by themselves among scholars. The important lesson is always the same. If Ahanâ is phonetically identical with Greek Athanâ and if Ahanâ is a name of the Dawn, it follows that the first conception of Athênê was the Dawn and that, as such, she sprang from the East or from the forehead of Zeus or Dyaus, the sky. If in the Veda she brings light and wakes and stirs up the thoughts of men, she became in Homer also the goddess of wisdom and the τεχνῶν μήτηρ πολύολβος. All this was perfectly known to Otfried Müller when in 1825 he wrote: “Because the name of the goddess was originally a word of the language and always remained so, Charis glided from poem to poem and preserved by means of the word her general meaning in every individual manifestation” (p. 249).

Sûn_ri_tâ, another name of the Dawn, is more difficult to explain. Sûn_ri_ta in the sense of true, seems to me to have been formed in mistaken analogy to An-_ri_ta[34], untrue, and to have meant originally true, then sincere, gentle, agreeable. As applied to the Dawn it would have meant true, kind, auspicious.

But whatever obscurity there may still be left as to the meaning of single words in our hymn, can any one doubt that the whole of it was simply an address or a prayer to the Dawn, without any reference, as yet, to any complicated ceremonial, as described in the Sûtras and Brâhma_n_as, and alluded to in some of the hymns also? And why this persistent searching for allusions to ceremonial? No one ever denied the presence of real allusions in the Vedic hymns. But it is a matter of degree, a question of more or less, and these ceremonial details, so far from proving our hymns to be very modern and the work of professed priests, serve only to prove, what was well known from other sources also, that savage or uncivilised races adhere at all times with great punctiliousness to their ceremonial customs and traditions. M. Bergaigne has done excellent work in pointing out traces of the same punctiliousness among Vedic poets, but he has allowed himself to be carried away much too far by his own system, without either paying sufficient attention to native commentaries or allowing sufficient credit to his predecessors, particularly in Germany. To speak of _ces philologues d’outre Rhin_, is entirely out of place in the republic of letters, and encourages a literary _chauvinisme_ which will never find favour with the best scholars of France.

Leaving out Sûryâ, the female representative of the sun, and more or less a Dawn again, and V_ri_shâkapâyî, because her character is not quite clear as yet, and Sara_n_yû = Erinys, because she is only mentioned in a few verses, we proceed now to Savit_ri_, the rising sun. Though Savit_ri_ is a name applied to the sun in general, it is most frequently used as the name of the rising and life- and light-giving sun. Nor must it be supposed that Savit_ri_ is simply an appellative of the solar globe. Savit_ri_ has become a divine name or a divine _numen_ as full of life and personality as any other Deva. He can therefore be asked, as he is in verse 9, to hale and bring back the real sun. We shall easily recognise his character in the following hymn (Rig-Veda I, 35, 2):—

Hymn to Savit_ri_, Sun.

1.
I first call Agni[35] hither for our happiness,
I then call Mitra-Varu_n_a[36] to shield us here,
I call on Râtrî[37], sending all the world to rest,
I call for help on Savit_ri_, the brightest god.

2.
Approaching on the darkest path of heaven,
Setting to rest both mortal and immortal,
God Savit_ri_, on golden chariot standing,
Comes hither and beholdeth all creation.

3.
The brilliant god moves upward and moves downward,
The worshipful, drawn by his brilliant racers,
And from afar god Savit_ri_ approaches,
Driving away from us all that is evil[38].

4.
God Savit_ri_ stepped on his jewelled chariot,
The strong, the many-hued, its pins all golden[39],
And he, the worshipful, in brightest splendour,
Displays his strength across the darkest welkin.

5.
Black with white hoofs the horses shone upon us,
Dragging along the golden-shafted chariot;
All men, all creatures here for ever rested,
Safe in the lap of Savit_ri_ in heaven.

6.
Three skies are there of Savit_ri_, two places,
And one in Yama’s realm that holds our heroes[40],
Immortals[41] mounted on the chariot’s axle,—
Let him speak out who understands this saying.

7.
The glorious bird[42] has lighted-up the heaven,
The guide divine, whose wings are deeply sounding;
Where is the sun? Who knows it now, to tell us,
Which of the heavens his ray may have illumined?

8.
The earth’s eight quarters has the sun illumined,
Three miles of land, and all the seven rivers,
God Savit_ri_, the golden-eyed, has neared us,
And brought choice treasures to the liberal mortals.

9.
The golden Savit_ri_, who never rested,
Is moving forward, straight ‘tween earth and heaven,
He strikes disease, and hales the sun from yonder;
Through darkest clouds up to the sky he hastens.

10.
The guide divine, with golden arms appearing,
May come to us, the rich and gracious giver,
Praised every night, the god did come towards us,
Chasing away the noxious evil spirits.

11.
O Savit_ri_, come hither on thy pathways,
The old, well-made ones, dustless in the heavens,
And on those paths be thou our sure protector,
And grant to us to-day thy gracious blessing!

Is there one verse in this hymn that is not perfectly clear and intelligible, as belonging to a hymn addressed to the personified deity of the sun? Let us once understand that Savit_ri_ was a name of the sun, and why should he not be invoked for protection and for every kind of blessing? Of course, as soon as the sun was addressed by a poet, he ceased to be a mere sight. He became subjective, personal, and human, whether we like it or not. After that it does not require a great effort of imagination to address him as standing on a golden chariot, drawn by brilliant horses and all the rest. Surely the Vedic poets stood not alone in indulging in such imagery.

The sixth verse is no doubt difficult to understand in its minute detail, but its general sense is clear, and we must remember that the whole verse was really meant as a kind of riddle, a kind of amusement in which uncivilised races all over the world seem to have delighted.

Everything else is exactly what any poet might say of the sun. The sun might well be called a bird with golden wings, and if he is thanked for the treasures which he brings, surely the mere light of the morning and the warmth of the day are treasures sufficient for those whose very life must often have depended on the return of light and warmth after a cold and dark night, or on the return of spring after a severe winter. I cannot think that even native scholars could discover anything beyond what we ourselves see in this hymn, and as to M. Bergaigne, he must surely have been dazzled by his own system if he could perceive many, nay, any allusions to a highly developed system of sacrifice in any hymn like this. That such allusions exist in other hymns, I am very far from denying; what I deny is that liturgical thoughts ever obscured the broad physical features which formed the background of the ancient Vedic religion[43], nay, of the Vedic ceremonial also, built up at first for the sake of regulating the times and seasons of the year. I am the very last to deny to M. Bergaigne and his pupils the merit of having made the sacrificial system of the Vedic hymns more intelligible, but they have not sufficiently resisted the temptation of trying the key that opened one drawer, on all the drawers that still remained to be unlocked.

These hymns would suffice for the gods of the morning, and may help to open the eyes of our mythological Parâv_rig_as, who cannot see the light because there is too much of it.

I shall, however, add one more matutinal hymn addressed to Agni, not simply as the fire, but as the god of light which brightens the world every morning, and is in fact very difficult to distinguish from the sun. This Agni is sometimes called the first of all the gods. The word itself is the general name of fire in Sanskrit. It is phonetically the same as the Latin _ignis_, though the change of a into i is phonetically irregular. No one, however, is likely to be so bold an agnostic as to deny that the Âryas, before they separated, had made the discovery of fire, and given a name to it, such as Agni or _ignis_. What is most interesting in the development of this word is that while in India it entered into a very rich, religious, and mythological career, it remained a simple appellative in Italy, and was almost entirely lost and forgotten among the other Aryan nations. Should we be justified then in saying that the Latin _ignis_ cannot possibly be the same word as Agni, because the latter is one of the greatest gods in the Veda, while _ignis_ is no god at all? In the Veda Agni is a most prominent deity, though his character has often been misunderstood. Agni was, no doubt, the fire on the hearth and on the altar, and as such had his own development in India[44]. But Agni was also light in general, and more especially the light of the sun, whether in the morning, or at noon, or in the evening. Thus we read, Rig-Veda III, 28, 1:—

Agni, accept our offering, the cake, at the _morning libation_!
Agni, eat the cake offered to thee when the _day is over_!
Agni, accept here the cake at the _midday libation_!

Here Agni is clearly the sun, or the sunlight, or some power dwelling in the sun, all of which are very natural ideas with people in a nomadic or even agricultural state of society, nor do the three daily libations seem to me to point to any elaborate ceremonial. They are hardly more than the beginnings of the Sandhyâvandana and they could easily be matched among Semitic, nay, even among savage races.

In many hymns the solar character of Agni is merged in his domestic character, as the fire on the domestic hearth, as the centre of each family. Thus we read, Rig-Veda X, 1:—

Hymn to Agni, Fire.

1.
High[45], at the head of Dawn, he stood, the mighty,
With light he came, emerging from the darkness,
Fair-bodied Agni with his radiant splendour
Has filled, when born, all human habitations.

2.
Thou, being born, art child of Earth and Heaven,
Agni, the fair one, spread among the flowers[46];
The brilliant child by night and through the darkness,
Shouts for the cows[47] from far, above his mothers.

3.
Then knowing well the highest place in heaven,
As Vish_n_u, he, when born, protects the third place[48].
And when their milk[49] has in his mouth been offered,
They sing to him with one accord their praises.

4.
And then the mothers, bringing food, approach him,
They bring him viands and they watch his increase;
Though they have changed, thou goest again to see them
And art a priest[50] among the tribes of mortals.

5.
Then hail to Agni, as the guest of mortals[50],
The priest of holy rites on glittering chariot,
The brilliant signal[50] of all sacrifices,
Of any god, by might divine, the equal.

6.
Then, dressed in raiment beautiful, and standing
In morning light, a priest on earth’s old centre,
Thou, born in I_l_â’s place[51], a king and high priest,
Shalt hither bring the gods to our oblation.

7.
For thou hast ever spread both earth and heaven[52],
Again our friend, a true son to thy parents
Come hither, youthful god, to us who call thee,
And bring the gods, O son of strength[53], to usward!

Now, I ask once more, can anything be more simple and natural? And can we not, without any great effort on our part, transport ourselves into the position of the Vedic poet who uttered these words, and follow his thoughts, as he gazed on the rising sun? No one would suppose that this poet was the first on earth who ever addressed the rising sun, and that it was he who coined all the names by which the sun is addressed in these short songs. We can easily see what a long distance lies behind him, behind his words and behind his ideas. He was certainly not the first who invented priests and their sacrificial work. Only let us remember that, if we use such terms as priest or high priest, or king, we must not allow ourselves to assign to these terms, however unconsciously, all the meanings these words have with us.

These are very important cautions for people ignorant of Sanskrit, who have been led to imagine that the Vedic Âryas had kings like Solomon or Louis Quatorze, or High Priests like Samuel or Bossuet. The word which I translate by priest, is hot_ri_, which meant originally no more than shouter or invoker, and which in due time became the technical name of one of the sixteen _Ri_tvi_g_as or Season-priests. The other word Purohita means _praepositus_, or provost, and was at first no more than the priest who had to assist or to replace the father of a family, and had to see that all the offerings to the gods were made at the proper times and seasons, which probably was in the beginning no more than a contrivance for marking the essential divisions of the year.

Much depends here, as elsewhere, on the words which we use. Every act of worship may be called a sacrifice, and every sacred poet a high priest. To us these are very grand names and full of meaning. But let us look at some of the hymns addressed to Agni which are called sacrificial, and it seems to me that any peasant in his own cottage could have performed what is called a sacrifice, as presupposed, for instance, in the following hymn (Rig-Veda II, 6).

Hymn to Agni, Fire.

1.
Agni, accept this log of wood,
This service which I bring to thee,
Hear graciously these prayers and songs!

2.
With this log let us honour thee,
Thou son of strength, the horse’s friend,
And with this hymn, thou nobly born.

3.
And let us servants with our songs
Serve thee, the lover of our songs,
Wealth-lover, giver of our wealth!

4.
Be thou our mighty, generous lord,
Thou lord and giver of our wealth,
And drive all hatred far from us!

5.
He gives us rain from heaven above,
He gives inviolable strength,
He gives us food a thousandfold.

6.
Come here, most youthful messenger,
To him who lauds and craves thy help,
Most holy priest[54], called by our song.

7.
Agni, between both worlds[55], O sage,
Thou passest, as a messenger
Between two hamlets, kind and wise,

8.
Thou hast befriended us before,
Bring hither always all the gods,
And sit thou on this sacred turf[56].

But whether these so-called sacrifices were in the beginning as complicated as they certainly were in the end, they are perfectly intelligible, and probably will become much more so when we know more of the literature in which they are described. How much of their development is presupposed in the Vedic hymns, I tried to explain, however shortly, as long ago as 1859 in my ‘History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature,’ p. 468, and much has been added by others during the last forty years; but when we speak of Vedic sacrifices, we must not think of the temple at Jerusalem, or of St. Peter’s, but of a small plot of grass, on which a fire was kindled within the walls of piled up turf, and kept alive by pouring butter or fat upon it.

What is far more instructive in these hymns is the general attitude of the poet towards the sights of nature which attracted his attention, and the transition from a mere description of nature such as he saw it, to its being peopled with persons whom we call either divine or mythological. Here it is where the Veda has proved so useful, and has given quite a new character to the study of ancient religion and ancient mythology in every part of the world.

How much ingenuity was spent in former days to discover the origin of Zeus and the Greek dwellers on Olympus! After opening the Veda all becomes clear. What doubt can there remain that Zeus was Dyaus, originally the sky, but not the sky as the blue vault of heaven, but the sky as active, as personified and divine? We cannot expect to find many such cases as that of Dyaus = Zeus, where an Aryan god has preserved not only his old character in India and Greece and Italy, but his name, and that almost unchanged. We saw how the name of Agni was altogether lost in Greece, though preserved as an appellative in Italy. Yet the Greeks also had their god of fire, and their gods of light, such as Hephaestos, Apollon, Dionysos, Hermes and others, each developed in his own way. And here we come across some curious reminiscences among the Aryan nations. We saw how Agni, as morning sun, was called the son of heaven and earth. In other hymns he is actually called Dvimâtâ, having two mothers. This strange name meets us again in Greek Dimêtôr, in Latin as Bimatris. The child of two mothers or parents, a name quite intelligible, as we saw, in Sanskrit, as the son of heaven and earth, had become unintelligible in Greek and Latin, so that every kind of myth was invented to account for so strange a name. To say that the deity called Dvimâtâ in the Veda was the same as the Greek Dimêtôr or the Latin Bimatris would be going too far; but to say that Dimêtôr, i.e. Dionysos (*Dyu-ni_s_ya) was originally a god of light, as much as Agni, as much as Apollon, and Hermes, the son of heaven and earth, is perfectly right and helps us to account for a number of myths in classical mythology.

These more hidden influences of ancient Aryan mythology on that of Greeks and Romans, are often the most interesting. We have a similar case in Jupiter Stator, which is generally explained as the stopper, stopping the soldiers from running away. That may be the Roman explanation, but in the Veda we have the same word Sthâtâ, applied to Indra, first as Sthâtâ harî_n_âm, i.e. holder of horses, when he comes in his chariot; then as Sthâtâ rathasya, holder or governor of his chariot. When this origin was once forgotten, it would be not unlikely that a new meaning was discovered in Stator, viz. the preserver of law and order, or the keeper in battle.

If Agni, as in hymn X, 1, is identified with Vish_n_u, i. e. the sun in the zenith, we see how pliant the ideas of gods still were in the Veda. This Vish_n_u in India became in time as independent a deity as Apollon and Dionysos ever were in Greece, but they were all conceived as in the beginning sons of heaven and earth, and as closely allied with the sun in its various manifestations. The Vedic poet saw no difficulty in recognising the same elementary power in the sun rising in the morning, culminating at noon, and vanishing at night, nay in the fire on the hearth, and in the fire of the sacrifice, as the divine guest, the friend of the family, the priest on the altar. All this is not the Solar Theory, it is the Solar Fact, and not easily to be disposed of by an ignorant smile. Though Sanskrit scholars differ as much as other scholars, the broad facts of the Solar Theory have never been called in question by any competent authority, I mean, by anybody acquainted with Greek and Latin, and a little of Vedic Sanskrit.

While Agni here appears before us as the god of light in general, and often begins the procession of the daily gods as the light of the morning, as chasing away the dark night, as holding aloft the radiant sun, as leading forth the daughter of Dyaus (Διὸς θυγάτηρ), that is the Dawn, he being represented sometimes as the brother of the Dawn, sometimes as her lover[57], once even as kissing her[58], there are other deities, equally representative of light, but more specialised in their functions. Sûrya himself, the Greek Helios, appears among the Vedic deities, and Ushas (Eos), the dawn, is called Sûrya-prabhâ or sunshine.

We have so far watched the daily procession of the Vedic gods as reflected in the hymns, beginning with Agni, as god of light, especially the light of the morning, and in many respects the _alter ego_ of the sun. We saw that in one sense the Dawn also is only a female repetition of the auroral Agni (Agnir aushasya), and we met with a third personification of the morning sun in the shape of Savit_ri_, who is perhaps the most dramatic among the solar heroes, such as Mitra, Âditya, Vish_n_u and others.

The procession of the matutinal gods, which we have followed so far under the guidance of our old grammarian, Yâska, can be shown to rest on even earlier authority. Thus we read in one of the hymns themselves, Rig-Veda I, 157, 1:—

Agni awoke, from earth arises Sûrya,
Ushas, the great and bright, throws heaven open,
The pair of A_s_vins yoked their car to travel,
God Savit_ri_ has roused the world to labour.

There are other hymns, of course, that refer to the light of day or to the sun in his later stages also, culminating as Vish_n_u, or setting with T_ri_ta, till at last Râtrî, night, appears, and Varu_n_a, the coverer, reigns once more supreme in heaven. When we see Varu_n_a together with Mitra, the sun-god, they represent a divine couple, dividing between them the sovereignty of the whole world, heaven and earth, very much like the A_s_vins. They are not so much in opposition to each other, as partners in a common work.

Just as the night, the sister of the Dawn, is sometimes conceived as a dawn or day (Ahan) herself, Mitra and Varu_n_a also seem often to be charged with the same duties. They hold heaven and earth asunder, they support heaven and earth and are the common guardians of the whole world. Varu_n_a as well as Mitra is represented as sun-eyed. Still the contrast between the two becomes gradually more and more pointed, and we can clearly see that, while light and day become the portion of Mitra, night and darkness fall more and more to the share of Varu_n_a. The sun is said to rise from the abode of Mitra and Varu_n_a, but night, moon, and stars are mentioned in the hymns already, as more closely related to Varu_n_a. Thus we read, Rig-Veda I, 27, 10:—

The stars fixed high in heaven and shining brightly
By night, Oh say, where have they gone by daytime?
The laws of Varu_n_a are everlasting,
The moon moves on by night in brilliant splendour.

In Rig-Veda VIII, 41, 10, we ought surely to translate, “He made the white-clothed black-clothed,” and not, as proposed, “He made the black-clothed white-clothed,” a change which is never ascribed to Varu_n_a.

This explains why some scholars went so far as to recognise in Varu_n_a the original representative of the moon or of the evening star, a far too narrow conception, however, of that supreme deity, though true, no doubt, so far as Varu_n_a, like the sky, comprehends within his sphere of influence night and stars as well as sun and dawn. The almost perfect identity of name between Varu_n_a and Ouranos shows that Varu_n_a was not only a Vedic or Indian deity, but had been named already in the Aryan period. There are phonetic difficulties, but how should we account for the coincidences in the name and character of these two gods?

These few specimens of Vedic poetry will suffice, I hope, to show what is meant by the Solar Theory. It means that most of the physical phenomena which impressed the mind of primitive races, like those that have left us their religious utterances in the Veda, were connected with the sun, with the light of the morning, with day and night succeeding each other, and regulating the whole life of an agricultural population. What else was there to interest such people and to draw away their thoughts from a visible to an invisible world? If I have sometimes called that population uncivilised, what I meant was that we come across customs, such as the selling of children or offering them as victims, polygamy, possibly even polyandry, which are generally considered as signs or survivals of savagery. Such general terms, however, are often very misleading, and because in the Râ_g_asûya sacrifice, for instance, there are remnants of disgusting customs, we must not allow ourselves to indulge with certain so-called missionaries in a general condemnation of the Vedic ceremonial. We should rather learn the lesson that ceremonial is generally the accumulation of centuries, and contains, besides much that may be useful, a large quantity of old rubbish, mostly misunderstood, muddled, and complicated, till the meaning of it, if it ever had any, is lost beyond the hope of recovery.

If anybody, after reading these few hymns, selected quite at random, can still doubt whether the Solar Theory is the only possible theory to account for these Vedic deities, and in consequence, for the Aryan deities connected with them by name or character, I have nothing more to say. I doubt the existence of such a person. He must in very truth be a solar myth. Let me say once more that I have never looked upon all Vedic deities as solar or matutinal, but that other physical phenomena also, such as rivers, clouds, earth, night, storms, and rain had been personified or deified before these hymns could have been composed. It is true there is one hymn only addressed exclusively to the Night (X, 127), two only addressed to the Earth, but I pointed out before why such statistics, though very tempting, are altogether untrustworthy and have nothing whatever to do with the real importance or popularity of these deities. Does the ninth Ma_nd_ala of the Rig-Veda, with its 114 hymns almost entirely addressed to Soma, prove the supreme popularity of Soma as a member of the Vedic Pantheon? However, to guard against all possibility of misapprehending my purpose, here follows the hymn to Râtrî or Night; which can hardly be called solar in the usual sense of that word.

Hymn to Râtrî, Night.

1.
The Night comes near and looks about,
The goddess with her many eyes,
She has put on her glories all.

2.
Immortal, she has filled the space,
Both far and wide, both low and high,
She conquers darkness with her light[59].

3.
She has undone her sister, Dawn[60],
The goddess Night, as she approached,
And utter darkness[61] flies away.

4.
For thou art she in whose approach
We seek to-day for rest, like birds
Who in the branches seek their nest.

5.
The villages have sought for rest,
And all that walks and all that flies,
The falcons come, intent on prey.

6.
Keep off the she-wolf, keep the wolf,
Keep off the thief, O kindly Night,
And be thou light for us to pass.

7.
Black darkness came, yet bright with stars,
It came to us, with brilliant hues;
Dawn, free us as from heavy debt!

8.
Like cows, I brought this hymn to thee,
As to a conqueror, child of Dyaus,
Accept it graciously, O Night!

We must remember that the night to the Vedic poet was not the same as darkness, but that on the contrary, when the night had driven away the day, she was supposed to lighten the darkness, and even to rival her sister, the bright day, with her starlight beauty. The night, no doubt, gives peace and rest, yet the Dawn is looked upon as the kindlier light, and is implored to free mortals from the dangers of the night, as debtors are freed from a debt. Many conjectural alterations have been proposed in this hymn, but it seems to me to be intelligible even as it stands.

One more hymn to show how the belief in and the worship of these physical gods, the actors behind the phenomena of nature, could grow naturally into a belief in and a worship of moral powers, endowed with all the qualities essential to divine beings. Moral ideas are not so entirely absent from the Veda, as has sometimes been asserted, and nothing can be more instructive than to watch the process by which they spring naturally from a belief in the gods of nature. I give the hymn to Varu_n_a from Rig-Veda VII, 86, which I translated for the first time in my “History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature” in the year 1859, and which, with the help of other translations published in the meantime, I have now tried to improve and to clothe in the metrical form of the original.

Hymn to Varu_n_a.

1.
Wise, surely, through his might is his creation,
Who stemmed asunder spacious earth and heaven;
He pushed the sky, the bright and glorious, upward,
And stretched the starry sky and earth asunder.

2.
With my own heart I commune, how I ever
Can now approach Varu_n_a’s sacred presence;
Will he accept my gift without displeasure?
When may I fearless look and find him gracious?

3.
Fain to discover this my sin, I question,
I go to those who know, and ask for counsel.
The same reply I get from all the sages,
’Tis Varu_n_a indeed whom thou hast angered.

4.
What was my chief offence that thou wilt slay me,
Thy oldest friend who always sang thy praises?
Tell me, unconquered Lord, and I shall quickly
Fall down before thee, sinless with my homage.

5.
Loose us from sins committed by our fathers,
From others too which we ourselves committed,
As from a calf, take from us all our fetters,
Loose us as thieves are loosed that lifted cattle.

6.
’Twas not our own free will, ’twas strong temptation,
Or thoughtlessness, strong drink, or dice, or passion,
The old was near to lead astray the younger,
Nay, sleep itself suggests unrighteous actions.

7.
Let me do service to the bounteous giver,
The angry god, like to a slave, but sinless;
The gracious god gave wisdom to the foolish,
And he, the wiser, leads the wise to riches.

8.
O let this song, god Varu_n_a, approach thee,
And let it reach thy heart, O Lord and Master!
Prosper thou us in winning and in keeping,
Protect us, gods, for evermore with blessings!

I wish I could have introduced a larger number of my so-called Indian friends, the poets of sacred songs who may have lived thousands of years ago. But I am afraid I have already tired out the patience of my readers with these very ancient friends of mine. The only excuse I can plead is that my own friends in England and in Germany have so often wondered how I could have fallen in love with the Veda, and actually left my own country in order to rescue this forgotten Bible from utter oblivion. It is fortunate that people have different tastes and that we are not all devoted to the same beauty.

One more hymn I must add, however, for I am afraid if I do not, I shall be accused of having misrepresented the character of the Veda, as reflecting only the simplest thoughts of shepherds and cultivators of the land. I have remarked several times before that the Rig-Veda contains some very striking philosophical passages, and how far some of the Vedic poets must have been carried by purely metaphysical speculations may be seen by a hymn which I translated for the first time in my “History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature,” 1859. In putting it into a metrical form I was helped at the time by my departed friend, the late Archbishop of York, then Mr. Thomson, and I am glad to say I find little to alter in his translation even now.

Hymn X, 129.

Nor aught nor naught existed; yon bright sky
Was not, nor heaven’s broad woof outstretched above;
What covered all? what sheltered? what concealed?
Was it the waters’ fathomless abyss?
There was not death, hence was there naught immortal,
There was no light of night, no light of day,
The only One breathed breathless in itself,
Other than it there nothing since has been.
Darkness there was, and all at first was veiled
In gloom profound, an ocean without light;
The germ that still lay covered in the husk,
Burst forth, one nature, from the fervent heat.
Then first came Love upon it, the new germ,
Of mind; yea, poets in their hearts discerned
Pondering this bond between created things
And uncreated. Came this ray from earth
Piercing and all-pervading, or from heaven?
Then seeds were sown, and mighty powers arose,
Nature below, and Power and Will above;
Who knows the secret? who proclaimed it here,
Whence, whence this manifold creation sprang?
The gods themselves came later into being,
Who knows from whence this great creation sprang?
He from whom all this great creation came,
Whether his will created or was mute,
The most high Seer that is in highest heaven,
He knows it—or perchance e’en He knows not.

This hymn is important, not only by what it says, but by what it presupposes. Whatever date we may ascribe to it as incorporated in the Rig-Veda, many generations of thinkers must have passed before such questions could have been asked or could have been answered. As yet we see the Vedic age only as through a glass darkly. The first generation of Vedic scholars is passing away. It has done its work bravely, though well aware of its limits. Let the next generation dig deeper and deeper. What is wanted is patient, but independent and original work. There is so much new ground still to be broken, that the time has hardly come as yet for going again and again over the same ploughed field.

I must now part with my Vedic Friends. I can hardly hope that I have persuaded many of my English friends to share my feelings for my antediluvian acquaintances. All I care for is to make others understand how my heart was caught, and what I saw in my Indian love, not only in her Vedântic dreams and aspirations, but in the simplicity of her earliest utterances of trust in powers invisible, yet present behind what is visible, and in her faith in a law that rules both the natural and the supernatural world.

MY INDIAN FRIENDS.

V.

A Prime Minister and a Child-wife.

I have often had to give expression to a certain disappointment at not being able, when speaking of my Indian friends, to reveal more of their inner life. That life, we may be certain, is not absent, but it is kept hidden, just as Indian women are kept behind their purdahs or curtains and hidden under veils, more or less transparent. Some of our own distinguished men and women are perhaps too much given to perform their confessions and moral ablutions in public, while in India such books as Rousseau’s _Confessions_, or the _Confessions of St. Augustine_, nay, of Amiel or Marie Bashkirtseff, to mention some well-known instances only, can hardly be imagined. Introspection or self-examination exists no doubt among the men and women of India as well as anywhere else. But unless such inward searchings take a definite form in words, nay, in written and published words, they can hardly be said to exist. A man may enter into a dark cave and see visions, but unless he can find his way back into the bright light of day, unless he can find words for what was vaguely passing through the twilight of his memory, all vanishes again and leaves nothing behind but a nameless sentiment, like the feeling that is left by a dream, when we know indeed that we have been dreaming, but cannot recall what we saw in our dreams.

Even in the prayers which we possess of the people in India we find no very deep delvings into the soul of man. They consist chiefly of praises of the greatness of the gods or of God, of general confessions of human weakness or sin, but we hardly ever come across the agonised sufferings of self-reproachful saints, and we see little of that moral vivisection which, painful as it is to witness, often reveals to us some of the most secret springs of human nature which nothing else will bring to our view.

I cannot, therefore, even in the two cases of Indian friends which I have selected for my purpose here, promise anything like that minute moral and spiritual analysis which we find in the works of St. Augustine, of Rousseau, or Marie Bashkirtseff. One of my friends belonged to the highest, the other to the lowest ranks of Indian life; the one was a Prime Minister, the other what we should call a poor peasant-girl. I was brought into contact with them, not indeed face to face, but by correspondence only. The Prime Minister was the well-known Gaurîshankar Udayshankar Ozá, Minister of Bhavnagar. I am afraid that when people see these long and unpronounceable names they will at once put down the book. Names such as Rudyard Kipling, Bashkirtseff, or Pobedonostzeff may be mastered in time, but Gaurîshankar Udayshankar Ozá is too much for most people’s memories; and how can people, even if they manage to pronounce such a name, attach any meaning whatever to it? It might be better, perhaps, to give the name in its Sanskrit form, viz. Gaurî-_s_a_m_kara; we could then see some kind of meaning in it, provided we knew a little of Sanskrit. So far as one may guess the meaning of any proper names, Gaurî-_s_a_m_kara would be the name of the divine couple, _S_iva, sometimes called _S_a_m_kara, and Gaurî, better known under the name of Pârvatî, his wife. Of course the name may be interpreted differently also, but when we know that Gaurî stands for Pârvatî, and Shankar for _S_iva, we move at once in more or less familiar spheres, and we may look on the name as something like the Christian name Joseph Maria, which is not unusual as a Christian name in Roman Catholic countries. But when I call Gaurî-_s_a_m_kara the well-known Prime Minister of Bhavnagar, I anticipate another shrugging of the shoulders. What is Bhavnagar, where is it, and what is there really known about its “well-known” Prime Minister? Here are our difficulties, when we want to rouse the sympathies of our readers for anything connected with India. Yes, if Gaurî-_s_a_m_kara of Bhavnagar were Fergus McIvor, chief of Glennaquoich, all would go well. But to most people, except those who have been in India, Bhavnagar is almost a _terra incognita_, and as there are now no separate postage-stamps for the independent states of India, even children would say that there is no such state as Bhavnagar anywhere. Still there is a native state of that name in Kathiawar, with about 500,000 inhabitants, and there is a Râjah, who is called the Thakur Sahib of Bhavnagar. There is also a town of Bhavnagar, the capital of the state. Like most of the protected Rajput states, Bhavnagar enjoys as much freedom as is compatible with the welfare of its neighbours and the imperial interests of India. Under such conditions conflicts are, no doubt, inevitable, and it required no little statesmanship in the Râjah, and in his Dewân, or Prime Minister, to reconcile the interests of their subjects with those of their neighbours and with those of the British Empire. Quite a new class of native statesmen seems to have sprung up of late in these various dependent states, who are enabled, through the moral support which they receive from the Central Government, to reform the abuses of a personal and autocratic _régime_, to revive education, and to improve the sanitary condition of the towns and villages, to open commercial communications, and altogether to raise the political and moral status and character of the people committed to their charge. In many cases they had at the same time to keep on good terms with the English residents, who are not always the most amiable, and to protect the Râjahs themselves against the corrupting influences of their little courts and harems. Taking all this together, it is not difficult to see that their position was by no means an easy one, and that it required high qualities indeed in these native statesmen to enable them to hold their own, to satisfy the claims of all the parties with whom they had to deal, and at the same time not to stifle the voice of their own conscience.

But when an opening had once been made for native talent in this direction, native talent was not wanting. The names of such men as Sir Salar Jung in Hyderabad, Sir T. Madao Rao in Travancore, Indore, and Baroda, Sir Dinkar Rao in Gwalior, are well known, not in India only, but in England also, and not the least successful among them was our friend Gaurî-_s_a_m_kara.

With all the narrow prejudices of Oriental society, particularly in India, there was always a _carrière ouverte aux talents_. Gaurî-_s_a_m_kara was the son of a poor man, though he belonged to a good Brâhmanic family. His education would not, perhaps, have enabled him to pass the Indian Civil Service Examination, and yet what an excellent Civil servant would he have made. Examinations prevent many evils, but they cannot create or even discover the qualities necessary for a ruler of men.

Like Mr. Gladstone, Gaurî-_s_a_m_kara became known in India as the Grand Old Man, or, better still, as the Good Old Man, and, like Mr. Gladstone, he represented in himself a striking combination of the thinker and the doer, of the meditative and the active man. His deepest interest lay with the great problems of human life on earth, but this did not prevent him from taking a most active part in the great and small concerns of the daily life and the daily cares of a small state. He acted as Minister to four generations of the rulers of Bhavnagar, and he was a constant referee on intricate political questions to successive Political agents of Kathiawar. He could remember the first establishment of British authority in the Bombay Presidency, and he had been the contemporary and fellow-worker of Mountstuart Elphinstone at the time when the settlement of Guzarat and Kathiawar had to be worked out between the Gaikwar on one side and the English Government, as successor of the Peshwa, on the other. He came in contact not only with Mountstuart Elphinstone, who visited Kathiawar in 1821, but with Sir John Malcolm also, with Lord Elphinstone and Sir Bartle Frere—nay, as late as 1886, with Lord Reay, then Governor of the Bombay Presidency. After a conference with the old man—he was then eighty-one years of age, having been born in 1805—Lord Reay declared that he was struck as much by the clearness of his intellect as by the simplicity and fairness and openness of his mind; “and if we admire administrators,” he added, “we also admire straightforward advisers—those who tell their chiefs the real truth about the condition of their country and their subjects. In seeing the man who freed this State from all encumbrances, who restored civil and criminal jurisdiction to their villages, who settled grave disputes with Junaghad, who got rid of refractory Jemadars, I could not help thinking what could be done by such men of purpose and strength of character.