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

74
CHAPTER V
THE VEDIC DAWNS
Dawn-hymns the most beautiful in the Rig-Veda — The Deity fully
described, unobscured by personification — First hints about the long
duration of dawn — Recitation of a thousand verses, or even the whole Rig-
Veda, while the dawn lasts — Three or five-fold division of the dawn —
Both imply a long dawn — The same inferred from the two words Uṣhas
and Vyuṣhṭî — Three Rig-Vedic passages about long dawns, hitherto
misunderstood, discussed — Long interval of several days between the
first appearance of light and sunrise — Expressly mentioned in the Rig-
Veda, VII, 76, 3 — Sâyana’s explanation artificial and unsatisfactory —
Existence of many dawns before sunrise — Reason why dawn is addressed
in the plural in the Rig-Veda — The plural address not honorific — Nor
denotes dawns of consecutive days — Proves a team of continuous dawns
— The last view confirmed by the Taittirîya Samhitâ, IV, 3, 11 — Dawns as
30 sisters — Direct authority from the Taittirîya Brâhmana for holding that
they were continuous or unseparated — Sâyana’s explanation of 30 dawns
examined — Thirty dawns described as thirty steps of a single dawn —
Rotatory motion of the dawn, like a wheel, directly mentioned in the Rig-
Veda — Their reaching the same appointed place day by day — All indicate
a team of thirty closely-gathered dawns — Results summed up — Establish
the Polar character of the Vedic dawns — Possible variation in the duration
of the Vedic dawn — The legend of Indra shattering the Dawn’s car
explained — Direct passages showing that the dawns so described were
the events of a former age — The Vedic Dawns Polar in character.
The يig-Veda, we have seen, does not contain distinct
references to a day and a night of six months’ duration though the
deficiency is more than made up by parallel passages from the
Iranian scriptures. But in the case of the dawn, the long continuous
dawn with its revolving splendors, which is the special characteristic
of the North Pole, there is fortunately no such difficulty. Ushas, or the
Goddess of Dawn, is an important and favorite Vedic deity and is
celebrated in about twenty hymns of the يig-Veda and mentioned
more than three hundred times, sometimes in the singular and
sometimes in the plural. These hymns, according