The Arctic Home in the Vedas c12.7

c12.7

According to the Dawn theory, "the whole theogony and philosophy of the ancient world is centered in the Dawn, the mother of the bright gods, of the sun in his various aspects, of the morn, the day, the spring; herself the brilliant image and visage of immortality." Prof. Max Muller, in his *Lectures on the Science of Language*, further remarks¹ that "the dawn, which to us is a merely beautiful sight, was to the early gazers and thinkers the problem of all the problems. It was the unknown land from whence rose every day those bright emblems of divine powers, which left in the mind of man the first impression and intimation of another world, of power above, of order and wisdom. What we simply call the sun-rise, brought before their eyes every day the riddle of all riddles, the riddle of existence. The days of their life sprang from that dark abyss, which every morning seemed instinct with light and life.” And again “a new life flashed up every morning before their eyes, and the fresh breezes of the dawn reached them like greetings wafted across the golden threshold of the sky from the distant lands beyond the mountains, beyond the clouds, beyond the dawn, beyond ‘the immortal sea which brought us hither.’ The dawn seemed to them to open golden gates for the sun to pass in triumph, and while those gates were open their eyes and their minds strove in their childish way to pierce beyond the finite world. That silent aspect awakened in the human mind the conception of the Infinite, the Immortal, the Divine, and the names of dawn became naturally the names of higher powers.” This is manifestly more poetic than real. But the learned Professor explains many Vedic myths on the theory that they are all Dawn-stories in different garbs. Thus, if Saranyu, who had twins from Vivasvat, ran off from him in the form of a mare, and he followed her in the form of a horse, it is nothing but a story of the Dawn disappearing at the approach of the Sun and producing the pair of day and night. The legend of Suryâ’s marriage with Soma, and of Vṛiṣhâkapâyî, whose oxen (the morning vapours) were swallowed by Indra, or of Aditi giving birth to the Âdityas are again said to be the stories of the Dawn under different aspects. Saramâ, crossing the waters to find out the cows stolen by Paṇis, is similarly the Dawn bringing with her the rays of the morning, and when Urvashî says that she is gone away and Purûravas calls himself Vasiṣhṭha or the brightest, it is the same Dawn flying away from the embrace of the rising Sun. In short, the Dawn is supposed to have been everything to the ancient people, and a number of legends are explained in this way, until at last the monotonous character of these stories led the learned professor to ask to himself the question, “Is everything the Dawn? Is everything the Sun?”—a question, which he answers by informing us that so far as his researches were concerned they had led him again and again to the Dawn and the Sun as the chief burden of the myths of the Aryan race. The dawn here referred to is the daily dawn as we see it in the tropical or the temperate zone, or, in other words, it is the daily conquest of light over darkness that is here represented as filling the minds of the ancient bards with such awe and fear as to give rise to a variety of myths. It may be easily perceived how this theory will be affected by the discovery that Uṣas, or the goddess of the dawn in the Rig-Veda does not represent the evanescent dawn of the tropics, but is really the long continuous dawn of the Polar or the Circum-Polar regions. If the Arctic theory is once established, many of these mythological explanations will have to be entirely re-written. But the task cannot be undertaken in a work which is devoted solely to the examination of the evidence in support of that theory.