The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c16.s6.20

v1.c16.s6.20

The difficulty was fully known in the earliest period of Vedic interpretation: Yāska⁴ gives as alternative views sky and earth, which is the view of the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa,⁵ or day and night, or sun and moon, or two kings, performers of holy deeds. The last view is naturally that of Geldner,⁶ who denies their connexion with the Dioskouroi and asserts that they are merely Indian saints who save in time of trouble, a view which is clearly based on a false effort to dissociate Indian from Indo-European mythology. The view that the gods are sun and moon has the support of Ludwig,¹ Hillebrandt,² and Hardy,³ but nothing else whatever can be said for it. The explanations as day and night and sky and earth have equally feeble support, and more plausibility attaches to the suggestion, perhaps made by Yāska and adopted by Goldstücker, that the twilights are meant, the half-dark, half-light period before dawn, and this would account for the fact that one only is said to be a son of Dyaus. The more probable alternative to this view is that of Mannhardt⁴ and Oldenberg,⁵ who, on the strength in part of the mention of the morning star and the evening star in the account of the Lettish god or gods, take the two gods to be the morning and the evening star respectively. The difficulty of this conception is, of course, the fact that the gods are so essentially twin, and the view, if adopted, necessitates the supposition that this fact had gradually been obscured. There are indeed some traces of their separate character in the Rigveda⁶ itself: thus they are called ‘separately born’ and ‘born here and there’, and Yāska preserves a verse⁷ of which he says: ‘One is called the son of night, the other the son of dawn.’ This is, it must be admitted, far from convincing evidence of a real recollection of the twin character of the stars, but the suggestion of Weber,⁸ that they are to be taken as the twin stars of Gemini, is open to the quite fatal objection that there is nothing but the twin nature to commend it. Nor is the loss of the primitive connexion at all impossible, with the growing importance of the morning as the time of sacrifice.⁹