Artic Home of the Aryans by Lokamanya Bal ... - Mandhata Global

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that the Purânic tradition or legend is, fater all, not built upon a pure
misunderstanding of the original meaning of the epithet shata-kratu
as applied to Indra in the Vedic-literature. I am aware of the fact that
traditions in the post-Vedic literature are often found to have but a
slender basis in the Vedas, but in the present case we have
something more reliable and tangible to go upon. We have a group,
an isolated group of a hundred nightly Soma sacrifices and as long as
it stands unexplained in the Vedic sacrificial literature it would be
unreasonable to decline to connect it with the Purânic tradition of
Indra’s sole mastership of hundred sacrifices, especially when in the
light of the Arctic theory the two can be so well and intelligibly
connected. The hundred sacrifices, which are regarded as
constituting the essence of Indraship in the Purânas, are there said to
be the Ashvamedha sacrifices and it may, at the outset, be urged that
the shata-râtra sacrifice mentioned in the sacrificial works is not an
Ashvamedha sacrifice. But the distinction is neither important, nor
material. The Ashvamedha sacrifice is a Soma sacrifice and is
described in the sacrificial works along with the night-sacrifices. In the
Taittirîya Samhitâ ( VII, 2, 11) a hundred offerings of food to be made
in the Ashvamedha sacrifice are mentioned, and the Taittirîya
Brâhmana (III, 8, 15, 1) states that Prajâpati obtained these offerings
“during the night,” and consequently they are called Râtri-homas. The
duration of the Ashvamedha sacrifice is again not fixed, inasmuch as
it depends upon the return of the horse and in the يig-Veda (I, 163,
1) the sacrificial horse is identified with the sun moving in waters. The
return of the sacrificial horse may, therefore, be taken to symbolize
the return of the sun after the long night and a close resemblance
between the Ashvamedha and the night-sacrifices, which were
performed to enable Indra to fight with Vala and rescue the dawn and
the sun from his clutches, may thus be taken as established. At any
rate, we need not be surprised if the Shata-râtra Soma sacrifice
appears in the form of a hundred Ashvamedha sacrifices in the
Purânas. The tradition is substantially the