A History of Indian Literature v1.c8.s2.4

v1.c8.s2.4

and Vasiṣṭha. These and their descendants were regarded by the Indians as Ṛṣis or "seers"—we should say "authors"—of the hymns of Maṇḍalas II to VII. Book VIII contains hymns, which are ascribed to the singer race of the Kaṇvas and that of the Aṅgiras. But the Anukramaṇīs give us also the names of the Ṛṣis or "authors" of every single hymn of the remaining books (I, IX, X), and it is noteworthy that there are also women's names to be found amongst them. Unfortunately all these lists of names have practically no value at all, and in reality the authors of the Vedic hymns are quite unknown to us. For, as it has long since been proved,¹ the tradition which mentions Gṛtsamada, Viśvāmitra, and so on, *and* certain of their descendants, as the Ṛṣis of the hymns, disagrees with the statements of the hymns themselves. In the latter, *only* descendants of those ancient Ṛṣis are mentioned as authors of the hymns; the Ṛṣis, however, Gṛtsamada, Viśvāmitra, Vasiṣṭha, and whatever they may all be called—their names are well-known in the whole of Indian literature as the heroes of countless myths and legends—are already in the hymns of the Ṛgveda the *seers of a long-past prehistoric time*, and are only called the *fathers* of the singer families in which the songs were handed down. Book IX gains a character of unity through the fact that it contains exclusively hymns which glorify the drink of Soma, and are dedicated to the god Soma. Soma is the name of a plant, out of which an intoxicating juice was pressed, which already in the Indo-Iranian time was regarded as a drink pleasing to the gods, and therefore plays a prominent part at the sacrifices of the Indians as well as of the ancient Iranians, who called it Haôma. In ancient Indian mythology, however, the Soma drink is identified with the drink of immortality of the gods, and the seat of this divine drink is the moon, the golden-gleaming "drop"¹ in the sky. Therefore in Book IX of the Ṛgveda-Saṃhitā Soma is celebrated not only as the sacrificial drink dear to the gods, but also as the moon, the king of the sky. As the Soma-cult extends back into the Indo-Iranian period, we can also assume a fairly high age for the songs of Book IX, which are very closely connected with Soma sacrifice. The latest parts of our collection of hymns, however, are to be found in Books I to X, which are composed of very diversified elements.² Yet that does not mean that there are not some very old hymns which have been preserved in these books, while, on the other hand, some later hymns are also scattered in the "Family Books." Altogether, the question as to which hymns are "earlier" and which "later" is not easy to decide: for the language on which this decision chiefly rests, not only varies according to the age of the hymns, but also according to their origin and purpose, according to whether they arose more in connection with the priestly cult or with the popular religion.