The Arctic Home in the Vedas c10.3

c10.3

STARTING with the tradition about the half-yearly night of the gods found everywhere in Sanskrit literature, and also in the Avesta, we have found direct references in the Rig-Veda to a long continuous dawn of thirty days, the long day and the long night, when the sun remained above the horizon or went below it for a number of 24 hours; and we have also seen that the Rig-Vedic texts describe these things as events of a bye-gone age. The next question, therefore, is—Do we meet in the Vedas with similar traces of the Arctic conditions of seasons, months or years? It is stated previously that the calendar current at the time of the Vedic Samhitâs was different from the Arctic calendar. But if the ancestors of the Vedic people ever lived near the North Pole, “we may,” as observed by Sir Norman Lockyer with reference to the older Egyptian calendar, “always reckon upon the conservatism of the priests of the temples retaining the tradition of the old rejected year in every case.” Sir Norman Lockyer first points out how the ancient Egyptian year of 360 days was afterwards replaced by a year of 365 days; and then gives two instances of the traditional practice by which the memory of the old year was preserved. “Thus even at Philæ in later times,” says he, “in the temple of Osiris, there were 360 bowls for sacrifice, which were filled daily with milk by a specified rotation of priests. At Acanthus there was a perforated cask into which one of the 360 priests poured water from the Nile daily.”¹ And what took place in Egypt, we may expect to have taken place in Vedic times. The characteristics of an Arctic year are so unlike those of a year in the temperate zone, that if the ancestors of the Vedic people ever lived within the Arctic regions, and imigrated southwards owing to glaciation, an adaptation of the calendar to the altered geographical and astronomical conditions of the new home was a necessity, and must have been effected at the time. But in making this change, we may, as remarked by Sir Norman Lockyer, certainly expect the conservative priests to retain as much of the old calendar as possible, or at least preserve the traditions of the older year in one form or another especially in their sacrificial rites. Indo-European etymological equations have established the fact that sacrifices, or rather the system of making offerings to the gods for various purposes, existed from the primeval period;¹ and if so, the system must have undergone great modifications as the Aryan races moved from the Arctic to the temperate zone. I have shown elsewhere that calendar and sacrifice, especially the annual sattras, are closely connected, and that in the case of the annual sattras, or the sacrificial sessions which lasted for one year, the priests had in view, as observed by Dr. Haug,² the yearly course of the sun. It was the duty of these priests to keep up the sacrificial fire, as the Parsi priests now do, and to see that the yearly rounds of sacrifices were performed at proper times (ritus). The sacrificial calendar in the Arctic home must, however, have been different from what it came to be afterwards; and happily many traces of this calendar are still discoverable in the sacrificial literature of Vedic times, proving that the ancient worshippers or sacrificers of our race must have lived in circum-polar regions. But before discussing this evidence, it is necessary to briefly describe the points wherein we might expect the ancient or the oldest sacrificial system to differ from the one current in Vedic times.