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

THE COWS' WALK. 231 pertinent to the subject in hand, we cannot enter into it more fully in this place. We have now reviewed the leading features of the system of Soma sacrifices as described in the Vedic literature, so far as our purpose is concerned, and seen that by the aid of the Arctic theory, some hard facts therein, which have been hither- to incomprehensible, can be easily and naturally explained. A history of the whole sacrificial system from the point of view indicated above is a work quite outside the pale of this book; but so far as we have examined the subject and especially the question about the isolated group of a hundred nightly Soma sacrifices, I think, we have sufficient evidence therein to warrant us in holding that these sacrifices are a relic of the ancient times when the ancestors of the Vedic Ṛiṣhis performed them with the object of helping Indra to fight with the powers of darkness. It has been already shown in the first part of this chapter that the Gavâm-ayanam or the 'Cows'. walk,' like the Roman year, once lasted only for ten months; and a series of suitable night- sacrifices is a natural supplement to such sessions. Both are relics of ancient times, and taken along with the evidence regard- ing the existence of a long dawn of thirty days and of the long day and night discussed in previous chapters, they conclusively establish the existence of an ancient home of the ancestors of the Vedic people in the circum-polar region. The sacrificial sessions of the Navagvas and the Dashagvas, the legend of Dîrghatamas growing old in the tenth month, the tradition about the ancient year of five seasons, or the yoking of seven or ten horses to the chariot of the sun, all go to strengthen the same view; and the Avestic passages regarding the duration of Tishtrya's fight with Apaosha, the Purâṇic tradition about Indra's being the master of a hundred sacrifices or the destroyer of a hundred cities, the existence of a series of one hundred nightly Soma sacri- fices, which; though obsolete long since, could not have found