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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.s3: C. The Aryan Conception of the Heaven

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.s3

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C. The Aryan Conception of the Heaven

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J. Hertel⁷ claims that in India and Iran alike we find the conception of the heaven as a great stone building, filled with light, through whose doors, the sun and the stars, the light of heaven shines upon men. For this view is adduced the reference in the Rigveda to the palace of Varuṇa with a thousand doors, which is asserted to be none other than the heaven with its stars. For Iran there is the narrative in Vendīdād ii, which has long passed as the Iranian version of the legend of the flood, but in which we should rather see the account of Yama’s reign in the golden age and of the way in which he conveyed the first to die through the opening of the heaven, i.e. the sun, into the heaven of light. It is, however, true that this original legend of the Magian faith has been altered in the form in which we have it, since it could not, as it stood, be made consistent with the Zoroastrian doctrine of the fate of the dead. The Vara mentioned in the Vendīdād is to be compared with the Vedic Vala,⁸ which is none other than the closed firmament which the lord of the heaven of light, Bṛhaspati, or sometimes Indra, cleaves in order to set free the ruddy kine, i.e. the stars. Yet a further confirmation of the new interpretation of the Vendīdād is seen in an obscure verse of the Rigveda,⁹ which is made to yield the sense that Manu adorned with flames the door of the heaven of Indra. By yet another conjecture we are to see in Rigveda x. 14. 2 (‘Yama as the first hath found this way to the heaven for us, and this pastureland none can take from us’) the sole allusion to a legend of the gradual failure of the earth to support the number of those alive and the departure of Yama with the superfluous population, involving the introduction of death into the world.

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⁷ *Die Himmelstore im Veda und im Avesta* (1924).

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⁸ Contrast above, Chap. 9, § 1.

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⁹ viii. 63. 1.

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It is clearly impossible to accept this evidence as establishing the doctrine enunciated. That in one passage¹ Varuṇa’s palace with a thousand doors should be spoken of, is not the slightest proof that the Vedic Indian normally regarded the firmament as a building filled with light, whose doors were the sun and the stars, and the rendering of Rigveda viii. 63. 1, which ascribes to Manu the making of flames in the heaven of Indra, is clearly impossible;² even on Hertel’s hypothesis, all that Manu could naturally be said to do would be to enter by a flaming door, not to create it, and in fact the term *dhiyaḥ* here used refers clearly to devotion and not to flames. The version of Vala is wholly implausible, while the interpretation of the Vendīdād passage is accomplished merely by the process of inventing a meaning and explaining away everything which contradicts it by the theory of adaption to Zoroastrian ideas. Peculiarly gratuitous is the interpretation of Rigveda x. 14. 2, which has not the slightest reference to an overburdened earth, but merely to the winning of an abode which knows no ending in the sky. The whole doctrine that Yama removed the surplus population to the heaven because the earth was overcrowded is un-Vedic, and even the epic³ knows it not. For the Veda we have merely the aetiological legends of the expansion of the earth from a small nucleus, often by the action of a cosmic boar,⁴ and the wholly unconnected and late legend of the sinking of the earth in the ocean because the evil-minded Viçvakarman, son of Bhuvana, sought to bestow it upon the priest Kaçyapa, though no mortal had the right to do so.⁵

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¹ vii. 88. 5. Cf. Sraoša’s palace in Yasna, lvii. 21.

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² RV. x. 68. 11, cited as parallel, deals with the souls of the dead as stars, not as making holes in the sky; cf. AV. xviii. 2. 47.

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³ MBh. iii. 142. 35 ff.; xii. 255. 15 ff.

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⁴ MS. i. 6. 3; KS. viii. 2; TB. i. 1. 3. 5-7; ÇB. xiv. 1. 2. 11. For other legends of the expansion of the earth (*pṛthivī*, the broad), see PB. xx. 14. 5; TS. ii. 1. 2. 3.

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⁵ AB. viii. 21; ÇB. iii. 7. 1. 14 ff.

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There is, therefore, no ground to hold that the term açmānam svaryam in Rigveda, v. 56. 4, with the derivative v. 30. 8, refers to the firmament of stone which the Maruts cause to move. Quite different is vii. 86. 1, which ascribes to Varuṇa the motion of the lofty vault of heaven, that is the starry firmament, for that passage says nothing of the firmament as a building of stone. Wholly irrelevant also are passages in the Upaniṣads and later⁶ which treat of the sun as a stage on the way to the highest place; this is not the view of the Rigveda⁷ which expressly prays that those who despise Vedic practices (*apavrata*) may be debarred from the sun itself, doubtless as the abode of the holy, not as the way to it; Hertel himself recognizes that in ix. 113. 8 the pious man desires to win immortality in the place where is the closure of the sky, i. e. the sun. When in the Upaniṣads⁸ the moon appears as the door of the world of heaven, nothing whatever is said to suggest that this refers to an opening through which the waters of heaven are poured forth; clearly the reference is to the old idea that the souls of the dead go to the moon to dwell there, as the text in question expressly lays down. When the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa⁹ says that the rain springs from the moon and enters back into it, it says nothing of water from the heaven. Varuṇa’s connexion with rain is sufficiently natural without deriving it from the fact that the firmament is his palace, and that the ocean of the heaven is connected with the fire of heaven. Still less plausible is the treatment of Bṛhaspati as merely lord of the fire-heaven, who, therefore, can send down rain, or the assertion that the ruddy kine which he sets free are the stars who send rain, and that this conception of them is only explicable on the theory that they are doors to the fiery heaven.

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⁶ BAU. v. 10. 1; CU. viii. 6. 2; Muṇḍ. i. 2. 5, &c.

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⁷ v. 42. 9.

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⁸ KU. i. 2.

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⁹ viii. 28.

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Final arguments for the view of Hertel are based on a new interpretation of the Tištrya legend¹ as revealing the production of rain through the overflowing of the celestial ocean Vourukaša through the stars as the openings in the firmament, and on the view that the divine doors invoked in the Āprī hymns are really the sun, moon, and stars; it is sufficient to note his admission that this view was already unknown to the author of Rigveda x. 70. 5, and to add that this ignorance was fully justified by the incredible nature of the theory.²

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¹ Yašt, viii. Contrast Moulton, *Early Zoroastrianism*, pp. 22 ff., 436 f.

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² Hertel rejects the view of Grassmann and Oldenberg (*Prolegomena*, pp. 28, n. 1, 194 f.) that the Āprī hymn in ix. is a mere imitation of those for Agni in the other books, holding that it is due to the fire nature of Soma, shown by its effect on man and its identification with the moon. But the older theory is clearly the more plausible.

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