The Arctic Home in the Vedas c16.38

Language: English

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These periods differ slightly from those mentioned by me in Orion; but the change is needed in consequence of the theory of the Arctic home which carries back the beginning of the Pre-Orion or the Aditi Period to the commencement of the present post-Glacial era. In the language of the Purāṇas the first period after the close of the Ice Age (8000-5000 B. C.) may be called the Kṛita Yuga, or the age of wandering, as the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa (VII, 15) describes it to be. It was the period when the Aryan races, expatriated from their mother land, roamed over the northern parts of Europe and Asia in search of new homes. It is doubtful if the Brāhmaṇa meant as much when it described Kṛita to be the age of wandering. But nevertheless it is interesting to notice the new light thrown upon the characteristics of the four Yugas mentioned in the Brāhmaṇa. Thus we are told that “Kali is lying, Dvāpara is slowly moving, Tretā is standing up, and Kṛita is wandering.”¹ Dr. Haug understands this stanza to refer to the game of dice, and other scholars have proposed different interpretations. But in the light of the Arctic theory we may as well suppose that the different stages of life through which the Aryan races had to pass in post-Glacial times, from wandering in search of homes to final settlement in some lands of their choice, are here described, somewhat after the manner of the Avestic account of the sixteen ancient lands created by Ahura Mazda, and invaded in succession by Angra Mainyu.

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But even apart from this verse, we can very well see that during the first of the above periods the Aryan races had no fixed home, and many must have been the settlements made and abandoned by them before they permanently settled in congenial lands. I have already stated above that Aryan religion and worship are both inter-glacial; and that Vedic religion and ritual is a post-Glacial development of such relics of the ancient religion as were preserved from the general wreck caused by the Ice Age; and this affords in my opinion a safe basis to compare our results with the theological views mentioned above. We may not be able to fix definitely when each hymn of the Rig-Veda was sung; but we may safely say that those who survived the catastrophe, or their immediate descendants, must have incorporated into hymns the religious knowledge they had inherited as a sacred trust from their forefathers at the first opportunity, that is, soon after they were able to make at least temporary settlements. The hymns cannot, therefore, be supposed to promulgate a new religion consciously or unconsciously evolved on the plains of Central Asia in post-Glacial times; and the Polar character of the Vedic deities removes every doubt on the point. How far the language of the hymns, as we have them at present, resembled the ante-diluvian forms of speech is a different question;

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and according to Patanjali and Vyâsa, we are not here concerned with the words or the syllables of the hymns, which, it is admitted, have not remained permanent. We have to look to the subject matter of the hymns; and there is no reason to doubt either the competency or the trustworthiness of the Vedic bards to execute what they considered to be their sacred task or duty, viz., that of preserving and transmitting, for the benefit of future generations, the religious knowledge they had inherited from their ante-diluvian forefathers. It was by an agency similar to this that the hymns have been preserved accent for accent, according to the lowest estimate, for the last 3000 or 4000 years; and what is achieved in more recent times can certainly be held to have been done by the older bards in times when the traditions about the Arctic home and religion were still fresh in their mind. We may also observe that the hymns were publicly sung and recited, and the whole community, which must be supposed to have been interested in preserving its ancient religious rites and worship, must have keenly watched the utterances of these Rishis.

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We may, therefore, safely assert that the religion of the primeval Arctic home was correctly preserved in the form of traditions by the disciplined memory of the Ṛishis until it was incorporated first into crude as contrasted with the polished hymns (su-uktas) of the Ṛig-Veda in the Orion period, to be collected later on in Maṇḍalas and finally into Saṃhitâs; and that the subject matter of these hymns is inter-glacial, though its ultimate origin is still lost in geological antiquity. Without mixing up the theological and historical views we may, therefore, now state the two in parallel columns as follows:—