The Arctic Home in the Vedas c13.24.2

c13.24.2

surely is he hidden from those who saw him.” In I, 160, 1, we similarly find that “These Heaven and Earth, bestowers of prosperity and all, the wide sustainers of the regions, the two bowls of noble birth, the holy ones : between these two goddesses, the refulgent sun-god travels by fixed decrees.” These passages clearly show (1) that the sun was conceived as a child of the two bowls, Heaven and Earth, (2) that the sun moved like an embryo in the womb, i.e., the interior of heaven and earth, and (3) that after moving in this way in the womb of the mother for some time, and producing various offsprings, the sun sank into the land of desolation (Nir-ṛiti), and became hidden to those that saw him before. Once the annual course of the sun was conceived in this way, it did not require any great stretch of imagination to represent the dropping of the sun into Nir-ṛiti as an exit from the womb of his mother. But what are we to understand by the phrase that ‘he moved in the womb for ten months’? The Arctic theory explains this point satisfactorily. We have seen that Dîrghatamas was borne on waters for ten months, and the Dashagvas are said to have completed their sacrificial session during the same period. The sun can, therefore, be very well described, while above the horizon for ten months, as moving in the womb of his mother, or between heaven and earth for ten months.