The Arctic Home in the Vedas c8.2

c8.2

The Rig-Veda, we have seen, does not contain distinct references to a day and a night of six months' duration, though the deficiency is more than made up by parallel passages from the Iranian scriptures. But in the case of the dawn, the long continuous dawn with its revolving splendours, which is the special characteristic of the North Pole, there is fortunately no such difficulty. Uṣas, or the Goddess of Dawn, is an important and favourite Vedic deity, and is celebrated in about twenty hymns of the Rig-Veda, and mentioned more than three hundred times, sometimes in the singular and sometimes in the plural. These hymns, according to Muir, are amongst the most beautiful,—if not the most beautiful,—in the entire collection; and the deity, to which they are addressed, is considered by Macdonell to be the most graceful creation of Vedic poetry, there being no more charming figure in the descriptive religious lyrics of any other literature.¹ In short, Uṣas, or the Goddess of Dawn, is described in the Rig-Veda hymns with more than usual fulness, and what is still more important for our purpose is that the physical character of the deity is not, in the least, obscured by the description or the personification in the hymns. Here, therefore, we have a fine opportunity of proving the validity of our theory, by showing, if possible, that the oldest description of the dawn is really Polar in character. A priori it does not look probable that the Vedic poets could have gone into such raptures over the short-lived dawn of the tropical or the temperate zone, or that so much anxiety about the coming dawn should have been evinced, simply because the Vedic bards had no electric light or candles to use during the short night of less than 24 hours. But the dawn-hymns have not, as yet, been examined from this stand-point. It seems to have been tacitly assumed by all interpreters of the Vedas, Eastern and Western, that the Uṣas of the Rig-Veda can be no other than the dawn with which we are familiar in the tropical or the temperate zone. That Yāska and Sāyaṇa thought so is natural enough, but even the Western scholars have taken the same view, probably under the influence of the theory that the plateau of Central Asia was the original home of the Aryan race. Therefore several expressions in the dawn-hymns, which would have otherwise suggested the inquiry regarding the physical or the astronomical character of the Vedic dawn, have been either ignored, or some-how explained away, by scholars, who could certainly have thrown more light on the subject, had they not been under the influence of the assumption mentioned above. It is with passages like these that we are here chiefly concerned, and we shall presently see that if these are interpreted in a natural way, they fully establish the Polar nature of the Vedic dawn.