The Arctic Home in the Vedas c8.49

c8.49

There are a number of other passages where the dawn is spoken of in the plural, especially in the case of matutinal deities, who are said to follow or come after not a single dawn, but dawns in the plural, (I, 6, 3; I, 180, 1; V, 76, 1; VII, 9, 1; VII, 63, 3). These passages have been hitherto understood as describing the appearance of these deities after the consecutive dawns of the year. But now a new light is thrown upon them by the conclusion established above from the examination of the different passages about the dawn in the Rig-Veda, the Taittirîya and the Atharva-Veda Saṃhitâ. It may, however, be mentioned that I do not mean to say that in the whole of the Rig-Veda not a single reference can be found to the dawn of the tropical or the temperate zone. The Veda which mentions a year of 360 days is sure to mention the evanescent dawn which accompanies these days in regions to the south of the Arctic circle. A greater part of the description of the dawn is again of such a character that we can apply it either to the long Polar dawn, or to the short-lived dawn of the tropics. Thus both may be said to awaken every living being (I, 92, 9), or disclose the treasures concealed by darkness (I, 123, 4). Similarly when dawns of different days are said to depart and come, a new sister succeeding each day to the sister previously vanished (I, 124, 9), we may either suppose that the consecutive dawns of different days are intended, or that a number of day-long dawns, which succeed one another after every 24 hours at the Pole, were in the mind of the poet. These passages do not, therefore, in any way affect the conclusion we have arrived at above, by the consideration of the special characteristics of the dawns mentioned in the hymns. What we mean to prove is that Uṣas, or the Goddess of Dawn, the first appearance of which was so eagerly and anxiously looked to, and which formed the subject of so many beautiful hymns in the Vedic literature, is not the evanescent dawn of the tropics, but the long, continuous and revolving dawn at the Pole; and if we have succeeded in proving this from the passages discussed above, it matters little if a passage or more are found elsewhere in the Rig-Veda, describing the ordinary tropical dawn. The Vedic Ṛishis, who sang the present hymns, must have been familiar with the tropical dawn, if they now and then added a 13th month to secure the correspondence of the lunar and the solar year. But the deity of the Dawn was an ancient deity, the attributes of which had become known to the Ṛishis by orally preserved traditions, about the primeval home; and the dawn-hymns, as we now possess them, faithfully describe these characteristics. How these old characteristics of the Goddess of Dawn were preserved for centuries is a question to which I shall revert after examining the whole of the Vedic evidence bearing on the Polar theory. For the present we may assume that these reminiscences of the old home were preserved much in the same way as we have preserved the hymns, accent for accent and letter for letter, for the last three or four thousand years.