The moon moves on by night in brilliant splendour.
In Rig-Veda VIII, 41, 10, we ought surely to translate, “He made the white-clothed black-clothed,” and not, as proposed, “He made the black-clothed white-clothed,” a change which is never ascribed to Varuna.
This explains why some scholars went so far as to recognise in Varuna the original representative of the moon or of the evening star, a far too narrow conception, however, of that supreme deity, though true, no doubt, so far as Varuna, like the sky, comprehends within his sphere of influence night and stars as well as sun and dawn. The almost perfect identity of name between Varuna and Ouranos shows that Varuna was not only a Vedic or Indian deity, but had been named already in the Aryan period. There are phonetic difficulties, but how should we account for the coincidences in the name and character of these two gods?
These few specimens of Vedic poetry will suffice, I hope, to show what is meant by the Solar Theory. It means that most of the physical phenomena which impressed the mind of primitive races, like those that have left us their religious utterances in the Veda, were connected with the sun, with the light of the morning, with day and night succeeding each other, and regulating the whole life of an agricultural population. What else was there to interest such people and to draw away their thoughts from a visible to an invisible world? If I have sometimes called that population uncivilised, what I meant was that we come across customs, such as the selling of children or offering them as victims, polygamy, possibly even polyandry, which are generally considered as signs or survivals of savagery. Such general terms, however, are often very misleading, and because in the Râgasûya sacrifice, for instance, there are remnants of disgusting customs, we must not allow ourselves to indulge with certain so-called missionaries in a general condemnation of the Vedic ceremonial. We should rather learn the lesson that ceremonial is generally the accumulation of centuries, and contains, besides much that may be useful, a large quantity of old rubbish, mostly misunderstood, muddled, and complicated, till the meaning of it, if it ever had any, is lost beyond the hope of recovery.
If anybody, after reading these few hymns, selected quite at random, can still doubt whether the Solar Theory is the only possible theory to account for these Vedic deities, and in consequence, for the Aryan deities connected with them by name or character, I have nothing more to say. I doubt the existence of such a person. He must in very truth be a solar myth. Let me say once more that I have never looked upon all Vedic deities as solar or matutinal, but that other physical phenomena also, such as rivers, clouds, earth, night, storms, and rain had been personified or deified before these hymns could have been composed. It is true there is one hymn only addressed exclusively to the Night (X, 127), two only addressed to the Earth, but I pointed out before why such statistics, though very tempting, are altogether untrustworthy and have nothing whatever to do with the real importance or popularity of these deities. Does the ninth Mandala of the Rig-Veda, with its 114 hymns almost entirely addressed to Soma, prove the supreme popularity of Soma as a member of the Vedic Pantheon? However, to guard against all possibility of misapprehending my purpose, here follows the hymn to Râtrî or Night; which can hardly be called solar in the usual sense of that word.
Hymn to Râtrî, Night.
1.
The Night comes near and looks about,
The goddess with her many eyes,
She has put on her glories all.