CHAPTER X

THE VEDIC HYMNS

It has been possible to ascertain that the first words pronounced by the most ancient members of the Aryan family are connected by a thread of continuity to those which we use to-day in all languages, whether living or dead; our family would not be a portion of the entire human race, if this continuity of thought did not form a constituent part of the mental equipment of all the other families; but as no others possess in an equal degree with ourselves. the archives sufficiently extensive to contain indication of the gradual development of human speech, such as the Veda furnishes, that is the authority to which Max Müller appeals in all his works. And it is precisely because there has been no cessation in the continuity of human thought, that the historical method is the only one capable of linking us with the primitive Aryans; our work will consist in collecting tokens of the long pilgrimage undertaken by our ancestors, and with which we desire to be associated, and which those who come after us must also undertake.

"No doubt, between the first daybreak of human thought and the first hymns of praise of the Rig-Veda, composed in the most perfect metre and the most polished language, there may be, nay, there must be a gap that can only be measured by generations, by hundreds, aye, by thousands of years." 1 The exodus and separation of the Aryan family, belonging as it does to a prehistoric epoch and therefore unchronicled, and the Vedic Hymns-the

1 Max Müller, Origin and Growth of Religion, p. 231.

work of many centuries—having been completed and collected together some hundreds of years before our present era, thus at a time relatively recent, that which constitutes their chief claim to great antiquity in our eyes is that the Hindoo poets or rishis incorporated certain thoughts and words in them whose roots threw out shoots in the primitive Aryan soil before the dispersion of its members.

The period of the life of humanity into which the hymns enable us to penetrate, is the most ancient of which mention is made. The rishis sing in Sanscrit of thoughts conceived in the hidden recesses of souls before. they awoke to the consciousness of that concept to which the name of God alone can be applied, before these same people pictured in their imagination those whom they named gods, before the appearance of myths and mythological fables, and before the Sanscrit language existed.

Our Aryan ancestors had not left the cradle of their race when their language, whatever it may have been, possessed the root dyu and div, two cognate words meaning to shine. The Veda shows that many things were bright to the Vedic poets, the heaven, dawn, the stars and several other things, such as the rivers, spring, the fields, the eyes of man, all that would have the effect on us of being smiling, flourishing, and rejoicing in life; and from this root the word deva was formed. Neither in Greek nor in Latin, nor in any living language can a word be found which exactly expresses deva; Greek dictionaries translate it by Theos, in the same way as we translate Theos by God; but if-dictionary in hand-we put the word God in certain passages in the hymns where this word is found, we should sometimes commit a mental anachronism of a thousand years. At the time of the first Aryans, gods, in one sense of the word, did not exist; they were slowly struggling into being; it was therefore impossible for man to form any conception of them even in dreams. As this word deva changes its signification so frequently, not only in

the most ancient Brahmanic poems, but also in works of a later date, we can only obtain even an approximate idea of its meaning by writing its history, beginning from its etymology and ending with its latest definition; but it is not necessary to undertake this philological labour, and I shall content myself by showing that originally deva denoted a quality common to many natural phenomena, that of light, and therefore deva was a general term.

Man at first received this impression passively, as animals would, but by his nature he could not rest there; all the phenomena surrounding him were animated, the most marvellous and those of peculiar intensity moved in the upper regions of the firmament; in the midst of these general movements the mind of man could not alone be inactive, and thought and speech-that is reason—inevitably vindicated their right to activity; names were given to all things. The Aryan root svar or sval, which signified to shine, to sparkle, and to heat, produced a Sanscrit substantive meaning sometimes sun and sometimes the sky.

=

=

The Hindoo poets, the authors of these hymns, gave various names to the sun, according to the task it accomplished; and each name reproduced the salient feature of the task. The sun when rising was Mitra friend; as it advances on its journey, giving new life, it is Savitar = bringing forth, or leading day; the vivifying sun; when it collects the clouds and sends rain on the earth, it is Indra, from ind-u drops; and it continues to be Indra when its rays attain their zenith and reach their greatest splendour; for no plant flourishes without the combined action of light and humidity; the sun is Vishnu when it makes "its three strides " in the vault of heaven, its position in the morning, at noon, and in the evening; it is Varuna-the all embracing-when it envelops itself in clouds as in a shroud, and the sky darkens. Some phenomena descended on man from above, such as thunder-bolts, winds, storms; the storms that came unexpectedly, dealing

destruction as they passed received the name of Marutsfrom the root Mar-and with the meaning of those who strike or beat to death; the thunder was called Rudra he who roars; the wind was Vayu he who blows.

=

=

All these names indicated that which could be seen and that which could be heard; the invisible things remained unnamed; how was it possible for man to name that of which he was ignorant (except that they had a real existence), he who could only conceive a name after having seen a certain feature or quality in the object? They made use therefore of the names they already knew, and they rang the changes on the storm, the fire, and the firmament, which names they borrowed. Jacob's prayer, which arose in the darkness when he was wrestling with a great Unknown, "Tell me, I pray thee, thy name," must have been, in the early ages, the question of all humanity; but uttered under a thousand varying forms, and as, at the beginning, each name was imperfect, since it expressed only one side of the object, every additional name denoted a step forward, and every fresh check experienced by the mind in its search after accurate names only stimulated it to look elsewhere.

The first germ of the concept of law and order appears in the minds of the poets, and to this they give the name of Rita. This word has no equivalent in our languages, and translators are uncertain as to the meaning attached to it by the rishis. Pliant and full of capability, there seems no word more fitted to reflect new shades of thought; and in our efforts to understand it conjecture is much called into play, from the fact that we have to transfuse ancient thought into modern forms; in that process some violence is inevitable. Max Müller supposes, from etymological reasons, that Rita originally was used to express the regular movement of the heavenly bodies, and the path which they followed daily, from the one point of the heavens to the other, and he translates Rita by the

"right path." "If we remember how many of the ancient sacrifices in India depended on the course of the sun, how there were daily sacrifices, at the rising of the sun, at noon, and at the setting of the sun; how there were offerings for the full moon and the new moon, we may well understand how the sacrifice itself came in time to be called the path of Rita." 1 Rita expresses all that is right, good, and true, and Anrita was used for whatever is false, evil, and untrue; thus the Hindoos laid it down as an axiom that there was an universal law in the world equally binding on the physical phenomena and on conscious beings, such as themselves; and it was this law which ruled the times of the sacrifices to be offered to the divine powers; and this intuitive perception of law and order, which is the foundation of the ancient faith of the Asiatic Aryans, is far more important than all the histories of Savitar, Mitra, Rudra, and Indra, which are recounted at a later period of the gods of India. This belief in Rita, in law and order, as revealed in the unvarying movement of the stars, or manifested in the unvarying number of the petals, and stamens, and pistils of the smallest plant, was a grand thing; it was all the difference between a chaos and a cosmos, between the blind play of chance and a well defined plan. We have become so familiarised with the idea of a fundamental law, that it now often occupies us less than many of the secondary laws or causes; and yet our philosophers often find themselves at fault when they endeavour to give an exact idea of this primary law; but to the ancient prophets it must have been infinitely more perplexing, though also infinitely more important in their gropings after terra firma on which to plant their feet. The rishis are indefatigable in pointing to the straight path, or Rita, followed by the day and night; and because the gods have themselves followed this path, they have the strength to triumph over the powers of darkness, and 1 Max Müller, Origin and Growth of Religion, p. 250.

M