The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c16.s7.10

v1.c16.s7.10

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