instance, which we find almost everywhere, are originally
recollections of the annual torrents of rain or snow that covered the
little worlds within the ken of the ancient village-bards,[166] this
tearing asunder of heaven and earth too was originally no more than a
description of what might be seen every morning. During a dark night
the sky seemed to cover the earth; the two seemed to be one, and could
not be distinguished one from the other.[167] Then came the Dawn,
which with its bright rays lifted the covering of the dark night to a
certain point, till at last Maui appeared, small in stature, a mere
child, that is, the sun of the morning--thrown up suddenly, as it
were, when his first rays shot through the sky from beneath the
horizon, then falling back to the earth, like a bird, and rising in
gigantic form on the morning sky. The dawn now was hurled away, and
the sky was seen lifted high above the earth; and Maui, the sun,
marched on well pleased with having raised the sky to its present
height.
Why pumice-stone should be called the bones of Ru, we cannot tell,
without knowing a great deal more of the language of Mangaia than we
do at present. It is most likely an independent saying, and was
afterward united with the story of Ru and Maui.
Now I must quote at least a few extracts from a Maori legend as
written down by Judge Manning:[168]
"This is the Genesis of the New Zealanders:
"The Heavens which are above us, and the Earth which lies
beneath us, are the progenitors of men, and the origin of
all things.
"Formerly the Heaven lay upon the Earth, and all was
darkness....
"And the children of Heaven and Earth sought to discover the
difference between light and darkness, between day and
night....
"So the sons of Rangi (Heaven) and of Papa (Earth) consulted
together, and said, 'Let us seek means whereby to destroy
Heaven and Earth, or to separate them from each other.'
"Then said Tumatauenga (the God of War), 'Let us destroy
them both.'
"Then said Tane-Mahuta (the Forest God), 'Not so; let them
be separated. Let one of them go upward and become a
stranger to us; let the other remain below and be a parent
for us.'
"Then four of the gods tried to separate Heaven and Earth,
but did not succeed, while the fifth, Tane, succeeded.
"After Heaven and Earth had been separated, great storms
arose, or, as the poet expresses it, one of their sons,
Tawhiri-Matea, the god of the winds, tried to revenge the
outrage committed on his parents by his brothers. Then
follow dismal dusky days, and dripping chilly skies, and
arid scorching blasts. All the gods fight, till at last Tu
only remains, the god of war, who had devoured all his
brothers, except the Storm. More fights follow, in which the
greater part of the earth was overwhelmed by the waters, and
but a small portion remained dry. After that, light
continued to increase, and as the light increased, so also
the people who had been hidden between Heaven and Earth
increased.... And so generation was added to generation
down to the time of Maui-Potiki, he who brought death into
the world.
"Now in these latter days Heaven remains far removed from
his wife, the Earth; but the love of the wife rises upward
in sighs toward her husband. These are the mists which fly
upward from the mountain-tops; and the tears of Heaven fall
downward on his wife; behold the dew-drops!"
So far the Maori Genesis.
Let us now return to the Veda, and compare these crude and somewhat
grotesque legends with the language of the ancient Aryan poets. In the
hymns of the Rig-Veda the separating and keeping apart of Heaven and
Earth is several times alluded to, and here too it is represented as
the work of the most valiant gods. In I. 67, 3 it is Agni, fire, who
holds the earth and supports the heaven; in X. 89, 4 it is Indra who
keeps them apart; in IX. 101, 15 Soma is celebrated for the same deed,
and in III. 31, 12 other gods too share the same honor.[169]
In the Aitareya Brahma_n_a we read:[170] "These two worlds (Heaven and
Earth) were once joined together. They went asunder. Then it did not
rain, nor did the sun shine. And the five tribes did not agree with
one another. The gods then brought the two (Heaven and Earth)
together, and when they came together they formed a wedding of the
gods."
Here we have in a shorter form the same fundamental ideas: first, that
formerly Heaven and Earth were together; that afterward they were
separated; that when they were thus separated there was war throughout
nature, and neither rain nor sunshine; that, lastly, Heaven and Earth
were conciliated, and that then a great wedding took place.
Now I need hardly remind those who are acquainted with Greek and Roman
literature, how familiar these and similar conceptions about a
marriage between Heaven and earth were in Greece and Italy. They seem
to possess there a more special reference to the annual reconciliation
between Heaven and Earth, which takes place in spring, and to their
former estrangement during winter. But the first cosmological
separation of the two always points to the want of light and the
impossibility of distinction during the night, and the gradual lifting
up of the blue sky through the rising of the sun.[171]
In the Homeric hymns[172] the Earth is addressed as
"Mother of gods, the wife of the starry Heaven;"[173]
and the Heaven or AEther is often called the father. Their marriage too
is described, as, for instance, by Euripides, when he says:
"There is the mighty Earth, Jove's AEther:
He (the AEther) is the creator of men and gods;
The earth receiving the moist drops of rain,
Bears mortals,
Bears food, and the tribes of animals.
Hence she is not unjustly regarded
As the mother of all."[174]
And what is more curious still is that we have evidence that
Euripides received this doctrine from his teacher, the philosopher
Anaxagoras. For Dionysius of Halicarnassus[175] tells us that
Euripides frequented the lectures of Anaxagoras. Now, it was the
theory of that philosopher that originally all things were in all
things, but that afterward they became separated. Euripides later in
life associated with Sokrates, and became doubtful regarding that
theory. He accordingly propounds the ancient doctrine by the mouth of
another, namely Melanippe, who says:
"This saying (myth) is not mine, but came from my mother,
that formerly Heaven and Earth were one shape; but when they
were separated from each other, they gave birth and brought
all things into the light, trees, birds, beasts, and the
fishes whom the sea feeds, and the race of mortals."
Thus we have met with the same idea of the original union, of a
separation, and of a subsequent reunion of Heaven and Earth in Greece,
in India, and in the Polynesian islands.
Let us now see how the poets of the Veda address these two beings,
Heaven and Earth.
They are mostly addressed in the dual, as two beings forming but one
concept. We meet, however, with verses which are addressed to the Earth
by herself, and which speak of her as "kind, without thorns, and
pleasant to dwell on,"[176] while there are clear traces in some of the
hymns that at one time Dyaus, the sky, was the supreme deity.[177] When
invoked together they are called D y a v a - p_ r i_ t h i v y a u,
from d y u, the sky, and p _r i_ t h i v i, the broad earth.
If we examine their epithets, we find that many of them reflect simply
the physical aspects of Heaven and Earth. Thus they are called u r u,
wide; u r u v y a _k_ a s, widely expanded, d u r e - a n t e, with
limits far apart, g a b h i r a, deep; g h _r i_ t a v a t, giving fat;
m a d h u d u g h a, yielding honey or dew; p a y a s v a t, full of
milk; b h u r i - r e t a s, rich in seed.
Another class of epithets represents them already as endowed with
certain human and superhuman qualities, such as a s a _s k_ a t, never
tiring, a _g_ a r a, not decaying, which brings us very near to immortal;
a d r u h, not injuring, or not deceiving, p r a _k_ e t a s, provident, and then
pita-mata, father and mother, devaputra, having the gods for their
sons, _r i_ t a - v_ r i_ d h and _r i_ t a v a t, protectors of the _Ri_ta, of what
is right, guardians of eternal laws.
Here you see what is so interesting in the Veda, the gradual advance
from the material to the spiritual, from the sensuous to the
supersensuous, from the human to the superhuman and the divine. Heaven
and Earth were seen, and, according to our notions, they might simply
be classed as visible and finite beings. But the ancient poets were
more honest to themselves. They could see Heaven and Earth, but they
never saw them in their entirety. They felt that there was something
beyond the purely finite aspect of these beings, and therefore they
thought of them, not as they would think of a stone, or a tree, or a
dog, but as something not-finite, not altogether visible or knowable,
yet as something important to themselves, powerful, strong to bless,
but also strong to hurt. Whatever was between Heaven and Earth seemed
to be theirs, their property, their realm, their dominion. They held
and embraced all; they seemed to have produced all. The Devas or
bright beings, the sun, the dawn, the fire, the wind, the rain, were
all theirs, and were called therefore the offspring of Heaven and
Earth. Thus Heaven and Earth became the Universal Father and Mother.
Then we ask at once: "Were then these Heaven and Earth gods?" But gods
in what sense? In our sense of God? Why, in our sense, God is
altogether incapable of a plural. Then in the Greek sense of the word?
No, certainly not; for what the Greeks called gods was the result of
an intellectual growth totally independent of the Veda or of India. We
must never forget that what we call gods in ancient mythologies are
not substantial, living, individual beings, of whom we can predicate
this or that. D e v a, which we translate by god, is nothing but an
adjective, expressive of a quality shared by heaven and earth, by the
sun and the stars and the dawn and the sea, namely _brightness_; and
the idea of god, at that early time, contains neither more nor less
than what is shared in common by all these bright beings. That is to
say, the idea of god is not an idea ready-made, which could be applied
in its abstract purity to heaven and earth and other such like beings;
but it is an idea, growing out of the concepts of heaven and earth and
of the other bright beings, slowly separating itself from them, but
never containing more than what was contained, though confusedly, in
the objects to which it was successively applied.
Nor must it be supposed that heaven and earth, having once been raised
to the rank of undecaying or immortal beings, of divine parents, of
guardians of the laws, were thus permanently settled in the religious
consciousness of the people. Far from it. When the ideas of other
gods, and of more active and more distinctly personal gods had been
elaborated, the Vedic _Ri_shis asked without hesitation: Who then has
made heaven and earth? not exactly Heaven and Earth, as conceived
before, but heaven and earth as seen every day, as a part of what
began to be called Nature or the Universe.
Thus one poet says:[178]
"He was indeed among the gods the cleverest workman who
produced the two brilliant ones (heaven and earth), that
gladden all things; he who measured out the two bright ones
(heaven and earth) by his wisdom, and established them on
everlasting supports."
And again:[179] "He was a good workman who produced heaven and earth;
the wise, who by his might brought together these two (heaven and
earth), the wide, the deep, the well-fashioned in the bottomless
space."
Very soon this great work of making heaven and earth was ascribed,
like other mighty works, to the mightiest of their gods, to Indra. At
first we read that Indra, originally only a kind of _Jupiter pluvius_,
or god of rain, stretched out heaven and earth, like a hide;[180] that
he held them in his hand,[181] that he upholds heaven and earth,[182]
and that he grants heaven and earth to his worshippers.[183] But very
soon Indra is praised for having made Heaven and Earth;[184] and then,
when the poet remembers that Heaven and Earth had been praised
elsewhere as the parents of the gods, and more especially as the
parents of Indra, he does not hesitate for a moment, but says:[185]
"What poets living before us have reached the end of all thy
greatness? for thou hast indeed begotten thy father and thy mother
together[186] from thy own body!"
That is a strong measure, and a god who once could do that, was no
doubt capable of anything afterward. The same idea, namely that Indra
is greater than heaven and earth, is expressed in a less outrageous
way by another poet, who says[187] that Indra is greater than heaven
and earth, and that both together are only a half of Indra. Or
again:[188] "The divine Dyaus bowed before Indra, before Indra the
great Earth bowed with her wide spaces." "At the birth of thy splendor
Dyaus trembled, the Earth trembled for fear of thy anger."[189]
Thus, from one point of view, Heaven and Earth were the greatest gods,
they were the parents of everything, and therefore of the gods also,
such as Indra and others.
But, from another point of view, every god that was considered as
supreme at one time or other, must necessarily have made heaven and
earth, must at all events be greater than heaven and earth, and thus
the child became greater than the father, ay, became the father of his
father. Indra was not the only god that created heaven and earth. In
one hymn[190] that creation is ascribed to Soma and Pushan, by no
means very prominent characters; in another[191] to Hira_n_yagarbha
(the golden germ); in another again to a god who is simply called
Dhat_ri_, the Creator,[192] or Vi_s_vakarman,[193] the maker of all
things. Other gods, such as Mitra and Savit_ri_, names of the sun, are
praised for upholding Heaven and Earth, and the same task is sometimes
performed by the old god Varu_n_a[194] also.
What I wish you to observe in all this is the perfect freedom with
which these so-called gods or Devas are handled, and particularly the
ease and naturalness with which now the one, now the other emerges as
supreme out of this chaotic theogony. This is the peculiar character
of the ancient Vedic religion, totally different both from the
Polytheism and from the Monotheism as we see it in the Greek and the
Jewish religions; and if the Veda had taught us nothing else but this
_henotheistic_ phase, which must everywhere have preceded the more
highly-organized phase of Polytheism which we see in Greece, in Rome,
and elsewhere, the study of the Veda would not have been in vain.
It may be quite true that the poetry of the Veda is neither beautiful,
in our sense of the word, nor very profound; but it is instructive.
When we see those two giant spectres of Heaven and Earth on the
background of the Vedic religion, exerting their influence for a time,
and then vanishing before the light of younger and more active gods,
we learn a lesson which it is well to learn, and which we can hardly
learn anywhere else--the lesson _how gods were made and unmade_--how
the Beyond or the Infinite was named by different names in order to
bring it near to the mind of man, to make it for a time
comprehensible, until, when name after name had proved of no avail, a
nameless God was felt to answer best the restless cravings of the
human heart.
I shall next translate to you the hymn to which I referred before as
addressed to the Rivers. If the Rivers are to be called deities at
all, they belong to the class of terrestrial deities. But the reason
why I single out this hymn is not so much because it throws new light
on the theogonic process, but because it may help to impart some
reality to the vague conceptions which we form to ourselves of the
ancient Vedic poets and their surroundings. The rivers invoked are, as
we shall see, the real rivers of the Punjab, and the poem shows a much
wider geographical horizon than we should expect from a mere
village-bard.[195]
1. "Let the poet declare, O Waters, your exceeding greatness,
here in the seat of Vivasvat.[196] By seven and seven they
have come forth in three courses, but the Sindhu (the Indus)
exceeds all the other wandering rivers by her strength.
2. "Varu_n_a dug out paths for thee to walk on, when thou
rannest to the race.[197] Thou proceedest on a precipitous
ridge of the earth, when thou art lord in the van of all the
moving streams.
3. "The sound rises up to heaven above the earth; she stirs
up with splendor her endless power.[198] As from a cloud, the
showers thunder forth, when the Sindhu comes, roaring like a
bull.
4. "To thee, O Sindhu, they (the other rivers) come as lowing
mother-cows (run) to their young with their milk.[199] Like a
king in battle thou leadest the two wings, when thou reachest
the front of these down-rushing rivers.
5. "Accept, O Ganga (Ganges), Yamuna (Jumna), Sarasvati
(Sursuti), _S_utudri (Sutlej), Parush_n_i (Iravati, Ravi),
my praise![200] With the Asikni (Akesines) listen, O
Marudv_ri_dha,[201] and with the Vitasta (Hydaspes, Behat); O
Ar_g_ikiya,[202] listen with the Sushoma.[203]
6. "First thou goest united with the T_ri_sh_t_ama on thy
journey, with the Susartu, the Rasa (Ra_m_ha, Araxes?[204]),
and the _S_veti--O Sindhu, with the Kubha (Kophen, Cabul
river) to the Gomati (Gomal), with the Mehatnu to the Krumu
(Kurum)--with whom thou proceedest together.
7. "Sparkling, bright, with mighty splendor she carries the
waters across the plains--the unconquered Sindhu, the
quickest of the quick, like a beautiful mare--a sight to see.
8. "Rich in horses, in chariots, in garments, in gold, in
booty,[205] in wool,[206] and in straw,[207] the Sindhu,
handsome and young, clothes herself in sweet flowers.[208]
9. "The Sindhu has yoked her easy chariot with horses; may
she conquer prizes for us in the race. The greatness of her
chariot is praised as truly great--that chariot which is
irresistible, which has its own glory, and abundant
strength."[209]
This hymn does not sound perhaps very poetical, in our sense of the
word; yet if you will try to realize the thoughts of the poet who
composed it, you will perceive that it is not without some bold and
powerful conceptions.
Take the modern peasants, living in their villages by the side of the
Thames, and you must admit that he would be a remarkable man who could
bring himself to look on the Thames as a kind of a general, riding at
the head of many English rivers, and leading them on to a race or a
battle. Yet it is easier to travel in England, and to gain a
commanding view of the river-system of the country, than it was three
thousand years ago to travel over India, even over that part of India
which the poet of our hymn commands. He takes in at one swoop three
great river-systems, or, as he calls them, three great armies of
rivers--those flowing from the north-west into the Indus, those
joining it from the north-east, and, in the distance, the Ganges and
the Jumnah with their tributaries. Look on the map and you will see
how well these three armies are determined; but our poet had no
map--he had nothing but high mountains and sharp eyes to carry out his
trigonometrical survey. Now I call a man, who for the first time
could _see_ those three marching armies of rivers, a poet.
The next thing that strikes one in that hymn--if hymn we must call
it--is the fact that all these rivers, large and small, have their own
proper names. That shows a considerable advance in civilized life, and
it proves no small degree of coherence, or what the French call
_solidarity_, between the tribes who had taken possession of Northern
India. Most settlers call the river on whose banks they settle "_the
river_." Of course there are many names for river. It may be called
the runner,[210] the fertilizer, the roarer--or, with a little
poetical metaphor, the arrow, the horse, the cow, the father, the
mother, the watchman, the child of the mountains. Many rivers had many
names in different parts of their course, and it was only when
communication between different settlements became more frequent, and
a fixed terminology was felt to be a matter of necessity, that the
rivers of a country were properly baptized and registered. All this
had been gone through in India before our hymn became possible.
And now we have to consider another, to my mind most startling fact.
We here have a number of names of the rivers of India, as they were
known to one single poet, say about 1000 B.C. We then hear nothing of
India till we come to the days of Alexander, and when we look at the
names of the Indian rivers, represented as well as they could be by
Alexander's companions, mere strangers in India, and by means of a
strange language and a strange alphabet, we recognize, without much
difficulty, nearly all of the old Vedic names.
In this respect the names of rivers have a great advantage over the
names of towns in India. What we now call _Dilli_ or _Delhi_[211] was
in ancient times called Indraprastha, in later times _Shahjahanabad_.
_Oude_ is Ayodhya, but the old name of Saketa is forgotten. The town
of Pa_t_aliputra, known to the Greeks as _Palimbothra_, is now called
_Patna_.[212]
Now I can assure you this persistency of the Vedic river-names was to
my mind something so startling that I often said to myself, This
cannot be--there must be something wrong here. I do not wonder so much
at the names of the _Indus_ and the _Ganges_ being the same. The Indus
was known to early traders, whether by sea or by land. Skylax sailed
from the country of the Paktys, _i.e._ the Pushtus, as the Afghans
still call themselves, down to the mouth of the Indus. That was under
Darius Hystaspes (521-486). Even before that time India and the
Indians were known by their name, which was derived from _Sindhu_, the
name of their frontier river. The neighboring tribes who spoke Iranic
languages all pronounced, like the Persian, the _s_ as an _h_.[213]
Thus Sindhu became Hindhu (Hidhu), and, as h's were dropped even at
that early time, Hindhu became Indu. Thus the river was called
_Indos_, the people _Indoi_ by the Greeks, who first heard of India
from the Persians.
_Sindhu_ probably meant originally the divider, keeper, and defender,
from sidh, to keep off. It was a masculine, before it became a
feminine. No more telling name could have been given to a broad river,
which guarded peaceful settlers both against the inroads of hostile
tribes and the attacks of wild animals. A common name for the ancient
settlements of the Aryans in India was "the Seven Rivers," "Sapta
Sindhava_h_." But though sindhu was used as an appellative noun for
river in general (cf. Rig-Veda VI. 19, 5, samudre na sindhava_h_
yadamana_h_, "like rivers longing for the sea"), it remained
throughout the whole history of India the name of its powerful
guardian river, the Indus.
In some passages of the Rig-Veda it has been pointed out that sindhu
might better be translated by "sea," a change of meaning, if so it can
be called, fully explained by the geographical conditions of the
country. There are places where people could swim across the Indus,
there are others where no eye could tell whether the boundless expanse
of water should be called river or sea. The two run into each other,
as every sailor knows, and naturally the meaning of sindhu, river,
runs into the meaning of sindhu, sea.
But besides the two great rivers, the Indus and the Ganges--in
Sanskrit the Ganga, literally the Go-go--we have the smaller rivers,
and many of their names also agree with the names preserved to us by
the companions of Alexander.[214]
The Yamuna, the Jumna, was known to Ptolemy as [Greek: Diamouna],[215]
to Pliny as Jomanes, to Arrian, somewhat corrupted, as Jobares.[216]
The _S_utudri, or, as it was afterward called, _S_atadru, meaning
"running in a hundred streams," was known to Ptolemy as [Greek:
Zadardes] or [Greek: Zarados]; Pliny called it Sydrus; and Megasthenes,
too, was probably acquainted with it as [Greek: Zadardes]. In the
Veda[217] it formed with the Vipa_s_ the frontier of the Punjab, and we
hear of fierce battles fought at that time, it may be on the same spot
where in 1846 the battle of the Sutledge was fought by Sir Hugh Gough
and Sir Henry Hardinge. It was probably on the Vipa_s_ (later Vipa_s_a),
a north-western tributary of the Sutledge, that Alexander's army turned
back. The river was then called Hyphasis; Pliny calls it Hypasis,[218] a
very fair approximation to the Vedic Vipa_s_, which means "unfettered."
Its modern name is Bias or Bejah.
The next river on the west is the Vedic Parush_n_i, better known as
Iravati,[219] which Strabo calls Hyarotis, while Arrian gives it a
more Greek appearance by calling it Hydraotes. It is the modern Rawi.
It was this river which the Ten Kings when attacking the T_ri_tsus
under Sudas tried to cross from the west by cutting off its water. But
their stratagem failed, and they perished in the river (Rig-Veda VII.
18, 8-9).