The Antiquities of Orissa v2.c18.11

v2.c18.11

**[147] Sun as the healer of diseases.** The most remarkable fact noticeable in this story is the recognition of the sun as the healer of diseases. In the dawn of ancient Indian mythology the sun occupied the most prominent place in a quite different capacity. As the source of light, heat and life, it could not but produce a most vivid impression on the minds of those who first attempted to rise above the earth in search of a first cause of the diverse phenomena of creation and destruction which surrounded them. Its position, its majesty, its beneficence, alike recommended it to be the most adorable of objects. It was too far removed from the reach of human touch to be called matter ; it was the most gorgeous and majestic object on which the human eye could rest ; and it was perfectly unconnected with everything that could do any harm to man. And nothing in human conception could, in primitive times, be more fitly associated with the Divinity than the bright god of day. Its earliest epithet was Prajâpati, the lord of the animated creation, and innumerable were the hymns which the early Aryans addressed to it to bespeak its favour. Air, water and fire were but its manifestations and abided in it. In course of time, however, it lost this proud preeminence and took the secodary position of the visible emblem of the invisible Godhead. The sacred Gāyatri of the Brahmins recognised it in this capacity ; it invoked not the sun, but the Divine Spirit which vivified it. But the sun did not cease to be a god. Instead of being the God, it became one of the gods,—it became Viṣṇu, the ‘All-Pervader’. Other ehanges followed and these have been already summarised in a preceding part of this work (*ante* I, pp. [157] f). The last capacity in which we find the sun in the Śāstras is that of curing diseases, especially leprosy, and in this character it appears in the few temples still extant in honour of it.