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

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Vṛitra meant that he released these waters from the clutches of Vṛitra
and made them flow up again. When the waters were thus released,
they naturally brought with them, the dawn, the sun and the cows, i.e.
either days or the rays of the morning; and the victory was thus
naturally described as four-fold in character. Now we can also
understand the part played by parvatas, or mountains, in the legend.
It was the mountain Albûrz, or Hara Berezaiti; and as Vṛitra, by
stretching his body across, closed all the apertures in his
mountainous range, through which the sun and the waters came up,
Indra had to uncover or open these passages by killing Vṛitra. Thus
the Bundahish (V, 5) mentions 180 apertures in the east and 180 in
the west through Albûrz; and the sun is said to come and go through
them every day, and all the movements of the moon, the
constellations and the planets are also said to be closely connected
with these apertures. The same idea is also expressed in the later
Sanskrit literature when the sun is said to rise above the mountain in
the east and set below the mountain in the west. The mountain on
which Indra is said to have found Shambara (II, 12, 11), and the rock
of Vala wherein the cows were said to have been imprisoned by the
demon (IV, 3, 11; I, 71, 2) and which was burst open by Angirases,
also represent the same mountainous range, which separated the
upper from the lower celestial hemisphere, or the bright from the dark
ocean. This explanation of the Vṛitra legend may sound strange to
many scholars, but it should be borne in mind that the co-relation
between the flow of water and the rising of the dawn and the sun,
here described, is not speculative. If the Vedic works do not express
it in unambiguous terms, the deficiency is fully made up by the Parsi
scriptures. Thus in Khorshed Yasht (VI, 2 and 3,) we are told that
“When the sun rises up, then the earth becomes clean, the running
waters become clean.... Should the sun not rise up, then the Daevas
would destroy all the things that are in the seven Karshvares.” The
passages in the Farvardin Yasht are still more explicit. This Yasht is
devoted to the praise of the Fravashis, which correspond