The word apâd, which we have heretofore seen applied to the heroine, was applied, moreover, to the hero, giving rise to another popular legend, of which the Ṛigvedas offers us the mythical elements. We have already seen the sun as anipadyamanas, i.e., the sun who never puts his foot down; but this sun who never puts down his foot easily, came to be conceived of and represented as a sun without feet, or as a lame hero, who, during the night, by the perfidy of the witch, the dusk of evening, became also blind. In one hymn, the blind and the lame are not one, but two, whom propitious Indras guides;[98] in another, the blind-lame is one person, with the name of Pâravṛig, whom the two horsemen Açvinâu, the two friends of the dawn, enable to walk and to see.[99] The lame one who sees, shows the way to the blind who is able to walk, or the lame carries the blind; Indras, the hidden sun, guides the blind and the lame; or, the blind and the lame, lost in the forest, help each other; in the morning, the Açvinâu, the two horsemen, friends of the aurora, with the water of sight and of strength (that is, Páravṛig, the blind-lame having discovered the hidden fountain of the young girls of the dawn,[100] with the ambrosia of the aurora, with the aurora itself), make the blind see, and him who has no feet, the lame, walk; that is, they burst forth into the upper air again, transfigured now into the luminous sun who sets out on his heavenly voyage. I have said above that the hero becomes blind and lame through the perfidy and magic of the evening aurora: nor was the assertion unfounded; for the Vedic hymn in which Indras guides the blind and the lame, i.e., himself or the sun, in the gloomy tardy night, is the very same hymn in which is celebrated his heroic and manly enterprise of the destruction of the daughter of the sky. The sun Indras revenges himself in the morning upon the aurora of the morning, for the wrong done him by the aurora of the evening, beautiful, but faithless.
For the aurora counts among her other talents that of magic; when the Ṛibhavas created the aurora cow of morning, investing her with the skin of the aurora cow of evening, they endowed her with Protean qualities (Viçvarûpâm), and on this account the aurora herself is also called witch or enchantress (Mâjinî).[101] This aurora, this virago, this Amazon, this Vedic Medea, who, treacherously plunging her husband, or brother, the solar hero, into a fiery furnace, blinds and lames him, is punished in the morning for her crime of the evening. The hero vanquishes her, overcomes her incantations, and annihilates her. The Vedic hymn sings—"A manly and heroic undertaking thou hast accomplished, O Indras, for an evil-doing woman, the daughter of the heavens, thou hast smitten; the growing daughter of the heaven, the aurora, O Indras, thou hast destroyed; from the chariot, broken in pieces, fell the aurora, trembling, because the bull had struck her."[102] Here the mythical animal reappears on the same stage with the heroes, and for the image of the hero and the heroine there is substituted that of the cow and the bull.[103]
The sun and the aurora, therefore, do not always seek each other from promptings of affection only, nor is the hateful part always played by the aurora. The sun, also appears as a perverse persecutor in his turn. One Vedic hymn advises the aurora not to stretch out the web she works at too far, lest the sun, like a robber, with hostile intention, set fire to and burn her.[104] Another hymn tells us that the handsome one follows the beautiful one, the brother the sister, like a lover,[105]—the aurora fleeing from the sun, her brother, out of shame, and her brother following her, actuated by a brutal instinct. Finally, a third hymn shows us the Vedic Vulcan, the blacksmith of the gods, the sun Tvashṭar, called also the omniform sun (Sâvitâ Viçvarûpah), as father of Saraṇyû, another name for the aurora, omniform herself, like her father (and, like the cow, undergoing the triple transmutation at the hands of Tvashṭar, i.e., the three brothers, the Ṛibhavas), creating another form of himself, that is, the sun Vivasvant, to be able to espouse the aurora. Saraṇyû, perceiving perhaps that Vivasvant is her father under another shape, creates another woman like herself, and flees away on the chariot that flies of itself, and that was before given her by her father; and thereupon Vivasvant, in order to overtake her, transforms himself into a horse.[106]
But sometimes the alienation the sun and the aurora, the young husband and wife, is not due to evil propensities in themselves, but the decree of fate working through the machinations of monsters. The two beautiful ones are at bottom united by love and reciprocal gratitude; for now it is the sun who delivers the aurora, and now the aurora who liberates the sun; and we have already seen the aurora making the ambrosial milk drop for the sun from her cows, and the sun drawing up and delivering the cows of the aurora. There is a hymn in which the divine girl, the aurora, comes up in the east, with a lascivious air, smiling, fresh, uncovering her bosom, resplendent, towards the god who sacrifices himself,[107] that is to say, towards the sun, towards Çunahçepas (the sun), who, in three verses of another hymn,[108] invokes her, the well-known legend of which, narrated in the Âitareya-Brâhmaṇam, I shall briefly relate. The aurora has also the merit of having, with her pure and purifying light, opened the gates of the gloomy cavern, discomfited the enemies, the shades of night, and exposed to view the treasures hidden by the darkness (and here we have Medea again, but this time in a benignant form); she awakens to activity the sleepers and everything with life (and therefore, among the living sleepers, the sun, her son, whom one of the hymns represents as sleeping profoundly in the bosom of the darkness of night); she is the saviour of mortals,[109] that is to say, she protects mortals from death, and resuscitates them; she sees and foresees everything.[110] The awakener is also the awakened; the illuminator is also the illumined, or the wise; and the illumined or luminous one is also the beautiful one. From being small, she is become large[111] (the heroes and heroines of mythology are only small at birth, and pass at once into fulness of stature); from being infirm and sombre-visaged, by the grace of Indras and of the Açvinâu, she is cured and restored to strength and clearness.[112] But why was she dark at first? Because her mother, the night, is the black one; she, the white one, is born of the black one.[113]
During the night, the young girl was blind, and she recovers her sight by the grace of a wise one, one who, protected by Indras, another shape of Indras, has become enamoured of her. We have seen above that it is the Açvinâu who, with the aurora, give back to the sun his sight; here it is the sun who makes the aurora see, it is the sun who gives her light; and she who, having been blind, recovers her sight, becomes the protectress of the blind and preserver of vision,[114] like St Lucia, virgin and martyr, in the Christian Mythology. Physical truth and the mythical narration are in perfect accordance.
The night is now the mother, now the sister of the aurora; but the gloomy night is sometimes her step-mother, sometimes her half-sister. There is a riddle which celebrates the luminous night and the aurora, as two diversely beautiful ones who go together, but of whom one goes while the other comes.[115] Another hymn sings of them thus: "The brilliantly-decked one approaches, the white aurora comes; the black one prepares for her her rooms. The one immortal having joined the other, the two appear alternately in the heavens. One and eternal is the path of the two sisters; they follow it, one after the other, guided by the gods; they do not meet, and they never stand still—the two good nurses, night and aurora, one in soul yet different in form."[116] The two good nurses, night and aurora, whose hues alternate eternally, nourish between them one and the same child (the sun).[117] But the Ṛigvedas itself tells us that the night is not always the legitimate sister of the aurora; the latter "abandons now the one that is, now the one that is not, properly its sister."[118] Here probably we must understand by the proper sister of the aurora the luminous or moonlight night, and by the half-sister, the gloomy night, the night without a moon. This is the sister whom, in a hymn, the aurora removes, sends far away from her, while she shines to be seen of her husband;[119] and her half-sister, the night, is obliged to resign her place to her elder or better sister,[120] the word ǵyeshṭhas meaning not only the eldest, but the best. We have already seen that the aurora is the first to appear; as such, and as she who in the evening precedes the night (the evening aurora), she is the first-born, the eldest, the most experienced, the best; while, from another point of view, she is represented to us as the little one who becomes great, and, in this case, as younger sister of the night (the morning dawn). The dawns, or auroras, are saluted with the epithet of workwomen,[121] just as the good sister, with respect to the bad one, is always she who works, doing wonderful work, that is, spinning or weaving the rosy cloth. But the auroras are not only the workers, they are also the pure purifying and cleansing ones;[122] hence one can understand how one of the tasks imposed upon the youngest sister was that of purifying, purging, or separating the grain during the night, taking from it all that is impure, in which task she is assisted sometimes by a good fairy, sometimes by the Virgin Mary, who, according to all probability, is the moon.
One of the singular qualities of the younger sister is that she displays her beauty only before the eyes of her husband. The wife aurora manifests herself in the sight of her husband;[123] united, in her splendour, with the rays of the sun,[124] like a wife she prepares the dwelling of the sun.[125] Very brilliant, like a wife cleansed by her mother, she uncovers her body;[126] like a bather who shows herself, the shining one unveils her body;[127] she adorns herself like a dancer, uncovering, like a cow, her breast;[128] she displays her luminous garments;[129] all-radiant, with beautiful face, she laughs;[130] and he who has made the aurora laugh, her, the beautiful princess, who, at first, that is, during the night, did not laugh, espouses her; the sun espouses the aurora.
The celestial nuptials take place, and the ceremony is minutely described in the 85th hymn of the 10th book of the Ṛigvedas. But the marriage of the two celestials is never consummated except under conditions; these conditions are always accepted and afterwards forgotten, and it is now the husband who, by forsaking his wife, now the wife who, by abandoning her husband, violates the promise given. One of these estrangements, these temporary alienations of husband and wife, is described in the Ṛigvedas by the poetical myth of the dawn Urvaçî and her husband Purûravas, one of the names given to the sun. Urvaçî says of herself, "I have arrived like the first of the auroras;"[131] thereupon Urvaçî suddenly abandons her husband Purûravas, because he breaks an agreement made between them. We shall see further on in this chapter what this agreement was. Besides, having given him a son before her departure, she consoles him by permitting him to come and find her again in heaven, that is, by endowing the sun with the immortality she possesses herself. In the morning the aurora precedes the sun; he follows her too closely, and she disappears, but leaves a son, i.e., the new sun. In the evening the aurora precedes the sun; he follows her again, and she loses herself, now in a forest, now in the sea. The same phenomenon, a divorce of husband from wife, or a separation of brother and sister, or the flight of a sister from her brother, or again, that of a daughter from her father, presents itself twice every day (and every year) in the sky. Sometimes, on the other hand, it is a witch, or the monster of nocturnal darkness, who takes the place of the radiant bride, or the aurora, near the sun; and in that case the aurora, the beauteous bride, is spirited away into a wood to be killed or thrown into the sea, from both of which predicaments, however, she always escapes. Sometimes the witch of night throws the brother and sister, the mother and son, the sun and the aurora, together into the waves of the sea, whence they both escape again, to reappear in the morning.
All these alternative variations of a mythical representation become each in turn a legend by itself, as we shall see again more in detail, when the study of the different animals that take part in them shall furnish us with opportunities of doing so. In the meantime, we have here finished our enumeration of all that in the hymns of the Ṛigvedas refers in any way to the bull and the cow,—to the wind, moon, and sun bulls, to the cow-cloud, moon, spring and aurora,—leaving it, however, to be understood how natural it is to pass from the bull to the handsome hero-prince, and from the cow to the beautiful girl, the rich princess, the valiant heroine, or the wise fairy. For though in the mythical hymns of the Ṛigvedas we have little more than hints or foreshadows of the many popular legends which we have thus referred to, often without naming them, these are so many and so precise that it seems to me to be almost impossible not to recognise them. To demonstrate this, however, it will be necessary for me to show further what form the mythological ideas and figures relating to the animals dispersed in the Vedic hymns afterwards assumed in the Hindoo traditions.