वेदों की प्राचीनता एवं काल-निर्णय / ओरायन (लोकमान्य बाल गंगाधर तिलक - खगोलीय वैदिक शोध)

THE VEDIC DAWNS. 81 Pole, there is fortunately no such difficulty. Uṣhas, or the God- dess of Dawn, is an important and favourite Vedic deity, and is celebrated in about twenty hymns of the Ṛig-Veda, and mention- ed more than three hundred times, sometimes in the singular and sometimes in the plural. These hymns, according to Muir, are amongst the most beautiful,—if not the most beautiful,—in the entire collection; and the deity, to which they are addressed, is considered by Macdonell to be the most graceful creation of Vedic poetry, there being no more charming figure in the descrip- tive religious lyrics of any other literature*. In short, Uṣhas, or the Goddess of Dawn, is described in the Ṛig-Veda hymns with more than usual fulness, and what is still more important for our purpose is that the physical character of the deity is not, in the least, obscured by the description or the personification in the hymns. Here, therefore, we have a fine opportunity of prov- ing the validity of our theory, by showing, if possible, that the oldest description of the dawn is really Polar in character. A priori it does not look probable that the Vedic poets could have gone into such raptures over the short-lived dawn of the tropical or the temperate zone, or that so much anxiety about the coming dawn should have been evinced, simply because the Vedic bards had no electric light or candles to use during the short night of less than 24 hours. But the dawn-hymns have not, as yet, been examined from this stand-point. It seems to have been tacitly assumed by all interpreters of the Vedas, Eastern and Western, that the Uṣhas of the Ṛig-Veda can be no other than the dawn with which we are familiar in the tropical or the tem- perate zone. That Yâska and Sâyaṇa thought so is natural enough, but even the Western scholars have taken the same view, probably

• See Muir's Original Sanskrit Texts, Vol. V. p. 181; and Mac- donell's Vedic Mythology, p. 46. 11