We are on the vast table-land of Central Asia; gigantic mountains send forth on every side their thousand rivers; immense pasture-lands and forests cover it; migratory tribes of pastoral nations traverse it; the gopatis, the shepherd or lord of the cows, is the king; the gopatis who has most herds is the most powerful. The story begins with a graceful pastoral idyll.
To increase the number of the cows, to render them fruitful in milk and prolific in calves, to have them well looked after, is the dream, the ideal of the ancient Aryan. The bull, the fœcundator, is the type of every male perfection, and the symbol of regal strength.
Hence, it is only natural that the two most prominent animal figures in the mythical heaven should be the cow and the bull.
The cow is the ready, loving, faithful, fruitful Providence of the shepherd.
The worst enemy of the Aryan, therefore, is he who carries off the cow; the best, the most illustrious, of his friends, he who is able to recover it from the hands of the robber.
The same idea is hence transferred to heaven; in heaven there is a beneficent, fruitful power, which is called the cow, and a beneficent fœcundator of this same power, which is called the bull.
The dewy moon, the dewy aurora, the watery cloud, the entire vault of heaven, that giver of the quickening and benignant rain, that benefactress of mankind,—are each, with special predilection, represented as the beneficent cow of abundance. The lord of this multiform cow of heaven, he who makes it pregnant and fruitful and milk-yielding, the spring or morning sun, the rain-giving sun (or moon) is often represented as a bull.
Now, to apprehend all this clearly, we ought to go back, as nearly as possible, to that epoch in which such conceptions would arise spontaneously; but as the imagination so indulged is apt to betray us into mere fantastical conceits, into an à priori system, we shall begin by excluding it entirely from these preliminary researches, as being hazardous and misleading, and content ourselves with the humbler office of collecting the testimonies of the poets themselves who assisted in the creation of the mythology in question.
I do not mean to say anything of the Vedic myths that is not taken from one or other of the hymns contained in the greatest of the Vedas, but only to arrange and connect together the links of the chain as they certainly existed in the imagination of the ancient Aryan people, and which the Ṛigvedas, the work of a hundred poets and of several centuries, presents to us as a whole, continuous and artistic. I shall indeed suppose myself in the valley of Kaçmîra, or on the banks of the Sindhus, under that sky, at the foot of these mountains, among these rivers; but I shall search in the sky for that which I find in the hymns, and not in the hymns for that which I may imagine I see in the sky. I shall begin my voyage with a trusty chart, and shall consult it with all the diligence in my power, in order not to lose any of the advantages that a voyage so full of surprises has to offer. Hence the notes will all, or nearly all, consist of quotations from my guide, in order that the learned reader may be able to verify for himself every separate assertion. And as to the frequent stoppages we shall have to make by the way, let me ask the reader not to ascribe these to anything arbitrary on my part, but rather to the necessities of a voyage, made, as it is, step by step, in a region but little known, and by the help of a guide, where nearly everything indeed is to be found, but where, as in a rich inventory, it is easier to lose one's way than to find it again.
The immense vault of heaven which over-arches the earth, as the eternal storehouse of light and rain, as the power which causes the grass to grow, and therefore the animals which pasture upon it, assumes in the Vedic literature the name of Aditis, or the infinite, the inexhaustible, the fountain of ambrosia (amṛitasya nabhis). Thus far, however, we have no personification, as yet we have no myth. The amṛitas is simply the immortal, and only poetically represents the rain, the dew, the luminous wave. But the inexhaustible soon comes to mean that which can be milked without end—and hence also, a celestial cow, an inoffensive cow, which we must not offend, which must remain intact.[1] The whole heavens being thus represented as an infinite cow, it was natural that the principal and most visible phenomena of the sky should become, in their turn, children of the cow, or themselves cows or bulls, and that the fœcundator of the great mother should also be called a bull. Hence we read that the wind (Vâyus or Rudrâs) gave birth, from the womb of the celestial cow, to the winds that howl in the tempest (Marutas and Rudrâs), called for this reason children of the cow.[2] But, since this great celestial cow produces the tempestuous, noisy winds, she represents not only the serene, tranquil vault of the shining sky, but also the cloudy and tenebrous mother of storms. This great cow, this immense cloud, that occupies all the vault of heaven and unchains the winds, is a brown, dark, spotted (pṛiçnis) cow; and so the winds, or Marutas, her sons, are called the children of the spotted one.[3] The singular has thus become a plural; the male sons of the cloud, the winds, are 21; the daughters, the clouds themselves, called the spotted ones (pṛiçnayas) are also three times seven, or 21: 3 and 7 are sacred numbers in the Aryan faith; and the number 21 is only a multiple of these two great legendary numbers, by which either the strength of a god or that of a monster is often symbolised. If pṛiçnis, or the variegated cow, therefore, is the mother of the Marutas, the winds, and of the variegated ones (pṛiçnayas), the clouds, we may say that the clouds are the sisters of the winds. We often have three or seven sisters, three or seven brothers in the legends. Now, that 21, in the Ṛigvedas itself, involves a reference to 3, is evident, if we only observe how one hymn speaks of the 3 times 7 spotted cows who bring to the god the divine drink, while another speaks of the spotted ones (the number not being specified) who give him three lakes to drink.[4] Evidently here the 3, or 7, or 21 sister cows that yield to the god of the eastern heavens their own nutritious milk, and amidst whose milky humours the winds, now become invulnerable, increase,[5] fulfil the pious duties of benevolent guardian fates. But if the winds are sons of a cow, and the cows are their nurses, the winds, or Marutas, must, as masculine, be necessarily represented as bulls. In reality the Wind (Vâyus), their father, is borne by bulls—that is, by the winds themselves, who hurry, who grow, are movable as the rays of the sun, very strong, and indomitable;[6] the strength of the wind is compared to that of the bull or the bear;[7] the winds, as lusty as bulls, overcome and subdue the dark ones.[8] Here, therefore, the clouds are no longer represented as the cows that nurse, but with the gloomy aspect of a monster. The Marutas, the winds that howl in the tempest, are as swift as lightning, and surround themselves with lightning. Hence they are celebrated for their luminous vestments; and hence it is said that the reddish winds are resplendent with gems, as some bulls with stars.[9] As such—that is, as subduers of the clouds, and as they who run impetuously through them—these winds, these bulls, are the best friends, the most powerful helpers, of the great bellowing bull; of the god of thunder and rain; of the sun, the dispeller of clouds and darkness; of the supreme Vedic god, Indras, the friend of light and ambrosia—of Indras, who brings with him daylight and fine weather, who sends us the beneficent dew and the fertilising rain. Like the winds his companions, the sun Indras—the sun (and the luminous sky) hidden in the dark, who strives to dissipate the shadows, the sun hidden in the cloud that thunders and lightens, to dissolve it in rain—is represented as a powerful bull, as the bull of bulls, invincible son of the cow, that bellows like the Marutas.[10]