The Antiquities of Orissa v1.c10.8.2

v1.c10.8.2

In the same way a hymn to the Āpris makes "night and day interweave, in concert, like two famous female weavers, the extended thread to complete the web of the sacrifice".⁵ Elsewhere we read of the fathers, who "wove and placed the warp and the woof". (X.30). "Uṣā (dawn) is a goddess, in person manifest like a maiden, who goes to the resplendent and munificent sun, and, like a youthful bride before her husband, uncovereth, smiling, her bosom in his presence".⁶ Elsewhere she, "like a wife desirous to please her husband, puts on becoming attire, and smiling as it were, displays her charms".⁷ Again, "exhibiting her person like a well-attired female, she stands before our eyes, gracefully inclining like a woman who has been bathing".⁸ "Uṣas the daughter of heaven, tending to the west, puts forth her beauty like a well-dressed woman". In other places she is frequently represented as "clothed with radiance". The idea is repeated in connexion with the altar, which in one place is described as decorated in the same way, “as a wife attached to her husband puts on elegant garments to gratify him”.⁹ In a subsequent hymn, “the vast offspring of the firmament, the seven eternal ever youthful rivers”, of the Vedic age are said to be “not clothed, yet not naked”¹⁰. In the remarkable hymn, in which Trita prays to be released from his confinement in a well, he says, “the ribs (of the well) close round me, like the rival wives (of one husband);