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 This Dyaus is superseded in the Veda by his own son, Indra, whereas Zeus in Greece remained to the end the θεῶν ὕπατος καὶ ἄριστος.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.
1.
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,