The Sanscrit name Ahana, known before Greek and Sanscrit became separated, occurs but once in a hymn of the Rig-Veda; in India this mythological germ withered away, and even the name Ahana would not have survived, but for this single verse which saved it from oblivion; but it developed into a splendid growth in Greece, in the legend of Eos, which I have quoted.
In this hymn addressed to Ushas we read: “We have crossed the frontier of this darkness; Ahana shining forth gives light, lighting up all the world, awakening mortals to walk about—she received praise from every thinker.” Ahana rises from the head of Dyu, the forehead of the sky; she shows herself in the east, she advances and awakens the sleepers. In Sanscrit budh means to wake and to know, but light in Sanscrit has again a double meaning, and means knowledge, much more frequently and distinctly than light; this explains how Ahana, in awakening mortals, causes persons to know.
The stories of Daphne and of Ahana are closely allied, and the one explains the other. As long as we remain ignorant of the fact that at first Daphne and Aurora were one, this myth is inexplicable; but turn the name Ahana into Greek, and you have the Dawn in the features of a nymph loved by Apollo, and dying when the bright sun touched her with his rays.
But why, it may be asked, was Daphne supposed to have been changed into a laurel-tree? The dawn was called daphne, the burning; so was the laurel—as wood that burns easily, and whose flame throws a bright light—two different objects, but alike under one aspect, though two distinct acts. The root dah is found in daphne for laurel equally with Daphne, dawn, the synonymy of the two names producing the myth of Daphne. Although this legend first came to life on Greek soil, it would have been unintelligible without the help of the Veda, as the later Sanscrit supplied no key to it.
The Sanscrit root Ah is also the germ of the name of Athena, the termination of the name corresponding to Ahana; Athene is said to spring from the head of Zeus. This extraordinary birth, though post-Homeric, is no doubt of ancient date, since it repeats exactly the birth of Ahana. The Hellenists maintain that the Greeks were unconscious that the word Athene meant the dawn; doubtless few amongst them knew that Zeus originally meant the surface or forehead of the sky. It is also true that when the people of Athens worshipped Athene as their tutelary deity, she became something very different from the Indian Ushas; but if we notice carefully all the many and various ideas concerning this Greek goddess, we shall be led to the supposition that her cradle was no other than that of the dawn, namely, the east, the forehead of the sky, or Zeus. Neither in the Veda, nor in Homer, is there any mention of the mother of the dawn, although both mention her parents.
It is a curious fact that in the mythology of Italy, Minerva, who was identical with Athene, should from the beginning have assumed a name apparently expressive of the intellectual rather than the physical character of the Dawn-goddess. Minerva or Menerva is clearly connected with mens, the Greek menos, the Sanscrit manas, mind; mane in Latin is morning; manare is specially used of the rising sun; and matuta, another name of the same category, is the Dawn. The root man, which in all Aryan languages means thought, was at a very early time, like the Sanscrit budh, destined to express the revived consciousness of the whole of nature at the approach of the light of the morning. The equation Ahane = Athene is both phonetically and mythologically irreproachable, the correlative Minerva can also be explained mythologically.
To reject the explanations of these myths which Comparative Philology furnishes, it would be necessary to prove that Ahana and Eos do not mean the dawn, that Athene does not correspond with Ahana, and that Helios is not the sun.
Mythologists have sometimes failed to discover the primitive character of certain myths, because they have not looked beyond the Greek etymology. The word Erinnys, “hovering in the gloom,” corresponds exactly to the Sanscrit Saranyû = “break of day.” Poets sometimes speak of the Dawn as avenging the crimes committed in the dark; the myth of Erinnys denotes this same idea. Instead of our lifeless and abstract expression, “A crime is sure to be discovered,” the old proverbial and poetical saying amongst the Greeks and Hindoos was, Erinnys—Saranyû, “will bring misdeeds to light.” At first this phrase was free from all mythological taint, but it was afterwards transformed into a myth by the Greeks, as they were ignorant of the true signification of the name of Erinnys.
When the mythology of Greece fails to furnish an explanation of many of the Greek phrases, because it belongs to a later date than the classical period, the Veda may then be questioned, and will supply us with the information, by disclosing an ancient substratum of human thought, such as existed amongst the inhabitants of one of the most important regions of the world, India. It is with as much pleasure as assurance that we repeat to those learned scholars, who decline to open their eyes in order to see, or see only what they consider should be there, the Brahmanic saying, “It is not the fault of the post that the blind man passes it without noticing it.”
It seems astonishing that a people so richly endowed as the Greeks should have found pleasure in romancing so constantly concerning the sun and the moon, the day and the night, the dawn and the twilight; but the custom of repeating these mythological phrases, which much resembled each other, dated from an epoch before the Greeks, when nothing more powerfully attracted and fascinated the imagination of man than the aspect of nature’s forces, especially the return of the sun, bringing with it each morning light and heat and life. Repeated thus incessantly these phrases became idiomatic, and were retold long after the thread connecting them with the simple facts of nature was broken and lost to memory. At first some old grandmother would repeat them, partly understanding them in their true natural sense, and partly metaphorically; the sons of the old people would repeat them with a partial understanding; but the grandsons would relate them only for their peculiarities, or for the charm of their style and setting; and the great-grandchildren would hand them on at random, with no comprehension of their meaning. At a much later period when all these sayings, with no connection between them, had become traditional, the poets would embody them in verse, giving them their first form and permanence in a cycle of legends. They congratulated themselves on the treasure-trove, but marvelled that the Greeks should enclose these bald phrases of perpetual iteration in the casket of their literature. They might as well ask why the Greeks apparently sanctioned all the irregular verbs their language holds by retaining them in their grammar. Is it not a historical fact that cannot be denied that the whole Aryan peoples, without exception, have conserved as the heritage of their common origin not only the names of their divinities, their legends, and their folk-lore, but also remains of their primitive language. Here is a noteworthy statement. Comparative Philology has proved that there is nothing really irregular in a language, and that what was formerly considered so in declensions and conjugations is the stratum on which the edifice of each language raised itself progressively. This same apparent irregularity is found also in mythology, because it is itself only a sort of dialect or offshoot of language.