There is hardly a language in which sun and moon, day and night, dawn and fire have not received their names, many of which, on account of their multiplicity, led almost inevitably to mythological metamorphosis. Anthropology has clearly shown that the idea that exceptional events such as meteors, earthquakes, hurricanes, lightning, eclipses of sun or moon, furnished the first impulses to religion and mythology is no longer tenable, even though it has, or rather seemed to have, the often quoted support of Seneca. If we may judge by what has been observed among uncivilised as well as civilised races—for even civilised races must once have been uncivilised—regularity attracts attention first and irregularity follows, or, as it has been more tersely expressed, the Gods come first, the Devils second, though it is quite true that in later times Devil-worship may have become more important, or, at least, more prominent than the worship of the Gods. Of these so-called prehistoric periods of human thought, however, we must always speak with great reserve. We must never forget that they are constructions of our own, and that we shall never be able to appeal to historical facts in support of our theories. Facts are given us for the first time during the Etymological Period of languages, and afterwards, but at a much later time, by the scant remains to be gathered from the Sacred Books of the East. And here the Vedic hymns will always hold their foremost place. However late we may place this systematic collection, their composition carries us back far beyond the chronological limits reached by any other documents. And what gives an additional interest to these Vedic fragments is that they allow us an insight into the earliest development not only of religion, but of mythology also. We see superstitions springing up by the side of religion, demons by the side of gods, agriculture by the side of the chase, bows and arrows by the side of the stone-weapons (Asani), such as Indra hurled against Vritra in his fight against the powers of darkness. Though the conception of the rainbow being the bow of the god of the sky is not to be found in the Rig-Veda, bows and arrows were well known to the worshippers of the Vedic gods. The Science of Mythology, after tossing about for centuries on the ocean of mere conjectures, has at last found its compass. We no longer see in it, like Bacon, mere lessons of morality in the disguise of fables, or broken rays of a primeval revelation, or misunderstood fragments of the Old Testament, still less recollections of a period of savagery to be studied in the myths and customs of modern savages, or survivals of a belief in amulets and magic incantations, generally the very latest outcome of mythology in its historical development, though I believe there are still survivals of defenders of every one of these time-hallowed theories. We know now, and we know it chiefly from the lessons taught us by the Veda, that our Aryan mythology, and to a certain extent our ancient Aryan religion also, took its origin from a poetical interpretation of the great phenomena of nature, personified and named as the chief agents of the eternal physical drama, enacted before us every day, every month, every season, every year, and we know also that this broad stream of mythology, when once started, was open to ever so many tributaries, superstitions, customs, vain genealogies, sorceries, idolatries of every kind, whether springing from fancies and imaginations, or from downright falsehoods and impositions. All these things are apt to be absorbed by mythology, and must be taken into account when we attempt a scientific analysis of it. It must not be supposed, however, that the attempt to find the key of Aryan mythology in fetishism, totemism, shamanism, and wherever it was not to be found, have been entirely wasted. A reconnoitring party, even though it return disappointed, has rendered real service by showing where the enemy is not to be found, and that service has certainly been rendered by the exploring parties who thought they could discover in Africa, America, or Australia what was ready to hand in India, Greece, Italy, and among Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic races.
People continue to write as if there was still some mystery about the Rig-Veda. There may have been when we began, in the days of Rosen and Burnouf, but there is no longer. The tools are there, all that is now required is honest work, and there is plenty of it, even if there were more real labourers and not merely gleaners than we have at present. It would be by no means difficult to put together a number of hymns which would at once settle the question by showing us the Hindu mind such as it really was during the Vedic period, and impressed by the grand sights of nature that passed before it day and night.
The same story is told again and again, and wherever we open the Rig-Veda, the same daily drama in its successive stages seems enacted before our eyes. Some people, more particularly the late M. Bergaigne, have been disconcerted by the many allusions not only to the sights of nature, but to the daily sacrifices also which occur in these hymns, but they evidently did not realise that, however complicated and technical the sacrifice had become before the time when these Vedic hymns were collected, there is nothing incongruous between praise and sacrifice. Sacrifice was a very natural occupation for the Vedic savages, as it is among savages at the present day. Whether a man who can describe the daily sunrise in artificial metres belongs to a more primitive humanity than a man who marks the stations of the sun, the phases of the moon, or the return of the seasons to say his prayers and pour out his libations, Sanskrit scholars would gladly leave to members of Ethnological Societies to determine. Whether the Veda is primeval or not, is another question that may likewise be left to those who know what primeval really means.
The grave mistake to be guarded against is to suppose that the Veda is an exclusively liturgical book, monotonous throughout, and belongs therefore to a late liturgical age. Savages, as ethnologists themselves have told us, are often very punctilious ritualists, and if we only consider how essential the Vedic sacrificial system was to the Âryas of India in determining times and seasons, in fact, in laying the first foundations of a well-regulated society, we shall no longer be surprised at the numerous liturgical allusions which occur in the Vedic hymns, nor on the other hand see more of liturgy in them than there really is. Whoever has read if only the first hymn of the Rig-Veda[[14]], will know how many words in it have a liturgical meaning, but nowhere have those liturgical ideas obscured the original character of the Vedic gods, as being the agents or actors in the physical drama of nature which first made the simple sons of nature ponder on the meaning of day and night, of sun and moon, of earth and sky, in fact of all that made them wonder, and turn their thoughts beyond the horizon of the visible world.
I think it may be best if I give here a few of those Vedic hymns. They have a right to a place among my Indian Friends. They have been with me for many years. They have often roused me in the morning, they have soothed me in the evening. I have tried to make them out as one tries to make out the character of a friend, even when at times one feels puzzled with him. I have always trusted them with good intentions, and if some of their utterances for a long time remained dark and still remain dark, are there not some dark corners in most of our friends, nay, even in ourselves?
It has been truly said that books are our best friends. We see more of them than of any other friends, and even if we get tired of them at times, they are always ready to renew their friendship. People of the world may wonder what we can see to attract us in such books as the Rig-Veda and to keep us faithful to them to the end. But if they tried, they would find that there are few of the great books of the world which are not worth knowing, and that there are many which deserve our friendship, our love, and our lasting gratitude.
I shall select these Vedic friends at random, following, however, the guidance of an old grammarian, Yâska, who tells us in what succession the Vedic gods appear on the heavenly stage every day, and particularly in the morning. It is in the morning, when light and life return that the bright beings, the Devas, are seen, and the daily revelation of another world takes place, while the various aspects of the new light are personified in the principal gods of the Veda. The order in which they appear, according to Yâska, is: Asvinau, day and night, Ushas, dawn, Sûryâ, wife of the sun, Vrishakapâyî, wife of Vrishakapi, doubtful, Saranyû, early dawn, Erinys, Savitri, the enlivening sun, Bhaga, the sun before sunrise, Sûrya, the risen sun.
We begin with the two Asvins whom Yâska places at the head of the daily procession of the Devas, the Bright Ones.
Hymn to the Asvins, Day and Night.
No Vedic gods have been so completely misunderstood as these heavenly twins, and misunderstood by the Brâhmans themselves. Still even these misunderstandings are instructive. The Asvins were taken for a pair of horsemen, though it is well known that riders on horseback occur very seldom in the Veda, so that some scholars have wrongly maintained that riding on horseback was altogether unknown in Vedic times. The Asvins were taken by native exegetes for old heroes or kings, and why they should have formed part of the Vedic gods who appear in the morning and the evening[[15]], was never so much as asked. Besides, Asvin would be a very strange name for rider, and would much rather convey the meaning of a descendant or connection of Asva, or Asvâ, i. e. the Horse, or the Mare, one of the many mythological names, as we saw, of the sun and the dawn. Being a couple the Asvins were really the oldest representatives of the couple of day and night, travelling always on their ordained path from morning till evening, the same path on which Agni also travels[[16]] in his character of the light of day. Thus they were very naturally mixed up with many of the daily adventures of the Sun and the Dawn[[17]]. Dyaus is called the father of the Asvins (Rig-Veda X, 61, 4), the Dawn their mother, while under another name, as Sûryâ, she is represented as the daughter of Savitri and as the beloved of the Asvins[[18]]. Another poet says that the Dawn is born, when the Asvins have harnessed their chariot, and that Day and Night, again the Asvins, spring from Vivasvat[[19]], the shining sun. As Saranyû, Erinys, also is called the mother of the Asvins, she must likewise have been another form of the Dawn in her varying aspects.