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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c16.s7: § 7. The Goddess Dawn

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c16.s7

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§ 7. The Goddess Dawn

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Uṣas the goddess is no small figure in the Rigveda: she is the subject of twenty hymns and is mentioned not less than 300 times in all, and the hymns addressed to her are among the most brilliant in the whole of the Saṁhitā. The personification of the dawn is of the slightest description, and takes the form of picturing her as a maiden decked by her mother in gay attire, who reveals her bosom to mortal eyes. She is young, being born again and again, and yet is ancient : she wastes away the life of mortals. She shines now, and shall shine in the future as in former days ; she shines forth, shortening the days of men, the last of the days that have dawned, the first of those that have to come. Uṣas on her coming awakes to life men and animals : the birds fly up from their nest, and men seek their work. She illumines the ways, and drives away the spirits of darkness and evil : bad dreams she sends to Trita Āptya. She opens the gates of darkness as the cattle their stall, and she is called the mother of cattle. She is borne on a shining swift car drawn by steeds, or ruddy kine or bulls, perhaps the red rays of the light of morning rather than the red clouds of the morning : in a day she traverses thirty Yojanas.

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The Dawn stands in the closest relation to the sun, who follows her as a lover. She is the wife as well as the beloved of Sūrya, but, as she precedes him as well as is followed by him, by another train of thought she appears as the mother of Sūrya or yet again as created by him. She is also the sister of the Āditya Bhaga, the kinswoman of Varuṇa, and the sister, the greater sister, of night, from whom, however, she is also born, and who appears invoked jointly with her ; both are mothers or wives of Sūrya or Agni.¹ Beyond all she is the daughter of Dyaus, and even once she appears as the beloved of heaven. With Agni she is closely connected, appearing before or with or after him as the fire lit for the morning sacrifice. She is the friend of the Açvins and is born at the yoking of their car : moreover, if she is Sūryā, she is also their wife. Once too, like Sūryā, she is associated with the moon, which precedes the dawns as the harbinger of day. Indra is said to have lighted up the dawn as is natural in the great finder of light, but once he appears as hostile and as shattering her car : ² the myth is obscure, and has been variously interpreted of the thunderstorm overwhelming the light of dawn, and as a victory of Indra bringing the sun over the dawn, which seeks to delay his advent. With the latter view may be compared the prayer that is once offered to her not to delay her coming, that the sun may not scorch her as a thief or an enemy.³ Normally, however, the Dawn never infringes the law of order : she goes straight along her path and never misses her way. She awakes the devout man to sacrifice, and is besought to let the niggard sleep on. But, by the usual inversion of ideas, she is sometimes represented as being awakened by the worshippers. To her worshipper she brings wealth, long life, renown, and glory, to her and to the sun the dead man is said to go,⁴ and the Fathers are seated in the lap of the ruddy dawns.⁵

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¹ Perhaps wives of Vivasvant ; *RV.* x. 17. 1 f. ; Hillebrandt, *Ved. Myth.* ii. 44–7.

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² RV. ii. 15. 6 ; iv. 30. 8–11 ; x. 138. 5 ; 73. 6. An Australian parallel is given by Lang, *Custom and Myth*, p. 210. The Brāhmaṇas have a tale of the incest of Prajāpati and Uṣas, apparently a myth of nature ; RV. i. 71. 5, 8 ; iii. 31. 1 ; v. 42. 13 ; x. 10. 1 ; 61. 5 ff. ; ÇB. vi. 1. 3. 7 f. ; i. 7. 4. 1 f. ; MS. iv. 2, 12 ; PB. viii. 2. 10.

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³ RV. v. 79. 9.

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⁴ RV. x. 15. 9.

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⁵ RV. x. 15. 7.

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Throughout the conception of dawn there runs the multiplicity of the actual dawns on the one hand and the unity of the goddess on the other hand; the poet here and there inclines to treat each dawn as a separate being, but this tendency is over-crossed by the unity of the substance of the deity. She is, of course, the Aurora of Rome and the Eos of Greece, but the parallelism is no proof of an Indo-European cult, and the Teutonic Ostara and the Lettish Uhsing represent rather a worship of the young sun in the spring.¹

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¹ Uṣas’s dance (RV. x. 29. 2) may be compared with the dance of the sun on Easter day in German and Slav mythology; von Schroeder, *Arische Religion*, ii. 51 ff. For Celtic parallels, see Rhys, *Celtic Heathendom*, pp. 299 f., 384 f., 456.

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It would, of course, be an error to suppose that these hymns to Dawn are generically different from the other Vedic hymns: they are not in the slightest degree inconsistent with the position which in the ritual the goddess has assigned her: she in the morning before the birds begin to sing is invoked with other deities, but receives no share in the Soma drink. On the other hand, while in much of the poetry there is, as a result in part of this fact, a freedom from connexion with the details of the offering, the priests were well aware of the value of the Dawn to them as bringing the activity of the sacrifice, and ensuring them the largesse which they desired: hence it is not impossible that the epithet Dakṣiṇā attributed in one passage to the goddess does directly identify her with the sacrificial fee, and reduce the dawn to the aspect of a valuable commercial asset.² It would be wrong, therefore, to accept the view ³ that the worship of Dawn died out as the Vedic Indians wandered further south-east, as was long ago suggested by Weber. On the other hand, it is clear that this worship must have had a commencement, and that too in some place where the phenomena of nature are such as to evoke the real poetry of the Vedic descriptions of dawn; that this must have been in the Punjab is all but certain. This fact alone would suggest the early date of the Uṣas hymns, for the heart of the Rigveda was not, we may be certain, composed there, but rather in the later Kurukṣetra country south of Ambāla, where alone the phenomena, which are seen in the myth of Indra, appear in their full form.⁴ In these later seats of Vedic civilization the goddess continued to receive her meed of praise, and hymns based on the old were composed for her, but the worship of the goddess was never of importance in the ritual. Hillebrandt’s ⁵ theory that the Dawn celebrated in the Rigveda is the first dawn of the new year, is wholly unsupported by any evidence, and depends on a theory of the Rigvedic view of the year which is arbitrary. He identifies dawn with the Ekāṣṭakā, which falls in the dark half of the month Māgha, and is connected with the Manes, but this is purely arbitrary. Nor is there any force in Brāhmaṇa assertions of Uṣas as wife of the year and wife of the seasons.¹

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² Bloomfield, *Rel. of Veda*, p. 71.

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³ Weber, *Omina et Portenta*, p. 351. Hillebrandt (*Ved. Myth.* ii. 38 f.) thinks that the dawn cult is to be traced to a place where winter conditions cause the cattle to be stalled in security from the cold, as in *Vend.* ii. 23; Vergil, *Georg.* iii. 352.

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⁴ Hopkins, JAOS. xix. 28 ff.; above, Part I, Chap. 1.

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⁵ *Ved. Myth.* ii. 25 ff., followed by von Schroeder, *Arische Religion*, ii. 58 f. For the fact that night in the Vedic conception preceded day see Keith, JRAS. 1916, pp. 143–6, 555–60. Virāj in AV. viii. 9. 1 may be dawn. For the dawns and Indra’s contest with Vala see Chap. 9, § 1.

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¹ ÇB. vi. 1. 3. 8; MS. ii. 13. 10. For Tilak’s theory of a polar dawn see *Arctic Home in the Vedas*, pp. 82 ff., and a refutation in A. C. Das, *Rig-Vedic India*, i. 390 ff.

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