35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

‘IT IS NOT MY FIRE THAT BURN YOU HERE’
pure crystal water, gurgling streams and the songs of birds; all the
noise there was to compete with the drone of insects and wind in
the leaves of mighty forests – besides the fearful, awe-inspiring crack
of thunder. All these beauties and terrors yet this man had no names
for them? He moved, he sat, he ate, he drank, he slept – yet he had
no terminology for such functions? Surrounded by colour, a riot of
it in an unrestrained, superabundant nature – white, red, green,
azure, pink, yellow, black – but he had no terms for these obvious
and dazzling differences?
It is at this moment, according to their own internal evidence,
that the first hymns of the Rig Veda were composed and passed to this
new species, our distant ancestors. Who composed them, however,
is another question altogether. Whoever it was seems to have come
from outside the society for which these hymns were composed. The
level of understanding, knowledge and wisdom contained in the Vedic
hymns does not just spring out of nowhere. Nor does the language
containing these, mankind’s loftiest thoughts. Thoughts that also
seem to have been mankind’s first thoughts. This alone makes
nonsense of ‘Progress’.
The very first function of the earliest Vedic hymns is to assign
names to objects in the natural world, and to assign these names in
highly general terms. The great Rig Veda, in ten thousand verses,
contains an astounding stock of some thirty-five thousand words,
all of them imbued with great elasticity, and enormous potentiality
for the coining of new terms. This presents a strong argument for
their representing the very start of language itself, the concept of
human language. Through this means humans could
communicate with fellow human beings and also establish a link
with posterity for the first time. Without this desire to hand
something on to the future, this instinct for stockpiling information,
there would be no history, no culture, no science, no philosophy, no
technology – no possibility of civilisation – because there would be
no continuity. Language, and language alone, made this possible.
And it paved the way for Homo Sapiens to become rulers of the
earth.
The appearance of language is a miracle every bit as divine and
ineffable as the Creation itself. For the Vedic sages, the three great
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