Hymn to Ushas, Dawn.

Next follows Ushas, the Dawn, identical in name, pace M. Reinach, with the Greek Eos. She is represented as the most beautiful heavenly apparition among the gods in their procession from East to West. She is called the daughter of Dyaus, the sister of Agni, also his beloved, according to the changing aspects in which the sun of the morning and the dawn presented themselves to the fancy, of the Vedic poets. I subjoin the translation of a hymn addressed to Ushas from the first Mandala, hymn 123.

Dakshinâ’s [^[22]] roomy chariot has been harnessed,

And the immortal gods have mounted on it,

The growing Dawn, free from the dark oppressor,

Stepped forth to spy for the abode of mortals.

The mighty woke before all other creatures,

She wins the race, and always conquers riches;

The Dawn looks out, young and reviving ever,

She came the first here to our morning prayers.

When thou, O Dawn, to-day dividest treasures,

Thou goddess, nobly born, among all mortals,

May Savitri [^[23]], the god, the friend of homesteads,

Proclaim us innocent before the sun-god!

To every house is Ahanâ [^[24]] approaching,

Giving to every day its name and being,

Dyotanâ[^[24]] came, for ever bent on conquest,

She gets the best of all the splendid treasures.

Varuna’s sister, sister thou of Bhaga,

O Sûnritâ[^[24]], O Dawn, sing first at daybreak;

May he fall back, the man that plotteth mischief,

With Dakshinâ and car let us subdue him.

Let hymns rise up, let pray’rs rise up together,

The fires have risen, clad in flaring splendour,

The brilliant Dawn displays the lovely treasures

Which had been hidden by the night and darkness.

The one departeth and the other cometh [^[25]],

Unlike in hue the two march close together;

One secretly brought night to earth and heaven,

Dawn sparkled forth on her refulgent chariot.

Alike to-day, alike to-morrow also,

They ever follow Varuna’s [^[26]] commandment;

They one by one achieve their thirty Yogans [^[27]],

And without fail achieve their lord’s (Varuna’s) commandment [^[28]].

She knows the first day’s name, and brightly shining,

White she is born to-day, from out the darkness;

The maiden never breaks th’ eternal order [^[29]],

And day by day comes to the place appointed.

10.

Proud of thy beauty, maiden-like thou comest,

O goddess to the god [^[30]] who thee desireth;

A smiling girl, thou openest before him

Thy bosom’s splendour, as thou shinest brightly.

11.

Fair as a bride, adorned by loving mother,

Thou showest forth thy form, that they may see it;

Auspicious Dawn, shine forth more wide and brightly,

No other dawns [^[31]] have ever reached thy splendour.

12.

With horses, cows, and all delightful treasures,

And striving with the rays of yonder Sûrya,

The Dawns depart and come again with splendour,

Bearing auspicious names and forms auspicious.

13.

Obedient to the reins of law eternal,

Grant us auspicious thoughts for our endeavours,

Shine thou upon us, Dawn, thou swift to listen,

May we and all our liberal chieftains prosper!

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 Hotri, 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, Dakshinâ, and Sûnritâ, 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 Dakshinâ, 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 Dakshinâ, 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 Dakshinâ in the first and fifth verses of our hymn as the salary of the priests. Now it is quite true that Dakshinâ 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, Sûnritâ, all ἅπαξ λεγόμενα, as names of the Dawn, then why not Dakshinâ? Dakshinâ 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 (Dakshinâ gâvah, Lâty. 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 Dakshinâ, the salary of priests, how could the Dawn have been called the salary? We can hardly explain why even that salary was called Dakshinâ, unless we suppose that it was meant for the right hand, or la bonne main, and in that case Dakshinâ, Dawn, might have been meant for the liberal goddess. But whatever the evolution of the meaning of Dakshinâ may have been [^[32]], when she was invoked as Dakshinâ, 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 Dakshinâ.” If Dakshinâ 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 Dakshinâ 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 Dakshinâyah, the son of Dakshinâ, 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 Sûnritâ.

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 Asru, instead of Dasru. 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 Varuna 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).

Sûnritâ, another name of the Dawn, is more difficult to explain. Sûnrita in the sense of true, seems to me to have been formed in mistaken analogy to An-rita [^[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 Brâhmanas, 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 Vrishâkapâyî, because her character is not quite clear as yet, and Saranyû = Erinys, because she is only mentioned in a few verses, we proceed now to Savitri, the rising sun. Though Savitri 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 Savitri is simply an appellative of the solar globe. Savitri 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 Savitri, Sun.

I first call Agni [^[35]] hither for our happiness,

I then call Mitra-Varuna [^[36]] to shield us here,

I call on Râtrî [^[37]], sending all the world to rest,

I call for help on Savitri, the brightest god.

Approaching on the darkest path of heaven,

Setting to rest both mortal and immortal,

God Savitri, on golden chariot standing,

Comes hither and beholdeth all creation.

The brilliant god moves upward and moves downward,

The worshipful, drawn by his brilliant racers,

And from afar god Savitri approaches,

Driving away from us all that is evil [^[38]].

God Savitri 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.

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 Savitri in heaven.

Three skies are there of Savitri, 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.

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?

The earth’s eight quarters has the sun illumined,

Three miles of land, and all the seven rivers,

God Savitri, the golden-eyed, has neared us,

And brought choice treasures to the liberal mortals.

The golden Savitri, 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 Savitri, 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 Savitri 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 Parâvrigas, 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:—