The Arctic Home in the Vedas c7.16

c7.16

The next authority for the statement is Manu I, 67. While describing the divisions of time it says, "A year (human) is a day and a night of the Gods; thus are the two divided, the northern passage of the sun is the day and the southern the night."[¹] The day and the night of the Gods are then taken as a unit for measuring longer periods of time as the Kalpas and so on, and Yâska's Nirukta, XIV, 4, probably contains the same reference. Muir, in the first Volume of his Original Sanskrit Texts, gives some of these passages so far as they bear on the yuga-system found in the Purâṇas. But we are not concerned with the later development of the idea that the day and the night of the Gods each lasted for six months. What is important, from our point of view, is the persistent prevalence of this tradition in the Vedic and the Post-Vedic literature, which can only be explained on the hypothesis that originally it must have been the result of actual observation. We shall, therefore, next quote the Mahâbhârata, which gives such a clear description of Mount Meru, the lord of the mountains, as to leave no doubt about its being the North Pole, or possessing the Polar characteristics. In chapters 163 and 164 of the Vanaparvan, Arjuna’s visit to the Mount is described in detail, and we are therein told, “At Meru the sun and the moon go round from left to right (pradakshinam) every day, and so do all the stars.” Later on the writer informs us:—“The mountain, by its lustre, so overcomes the darkness of night, that the night can hardly be distinguished from the day.” A few verses further, and we find, “The day and the night are together equal to a year to the residents of the place.”¹ These quotations are quite sufficient to convince any one that at the time when the great epic was composed Indian writers had a tolerably accurate knowledge of the meteorological and astronomical characteristics of the North Pole, and this knowledge cannot be supposed to have been acquired by mere mathematical calculations. The reference to the lustre of the mountain is specially interesting, inasmuch as, in all probability, it is a description of the splen-