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

336 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS. or hold that it was woven out of stray references in the Ṛig-Veda. But in the absence of the Arctic theory, or the theory of long darkness extending over nearly four months or a third part of the year, European Scholars have been at a loss to understand why the deity should have been named 'the Third'; and various ingenious theories have been started to explain how Trita, which ordinarily means the third, came to denote the deity that was thrown into a pit or well in a distant land. Thus Prof. Max Muller thinks that the name of the deity was originally Tṛita (तृत) and not Trita (त्रित); and he derives the former from the root tṛî (तॄ) to cross. Tṛita (तृत) which, by-the-by, is not a regular grammatical form though found in the Atharva Veda VI, 113, 1 and 3, would thus mean "the sun crossing the ocean," being in this respect comparable to taraṇi which means "the sun" in the later Sanskrit literature. In short, according to Prof. Max Muller, Tṛita (तृत) means the 'set sun'; and the story of Trita (त्रित) is, therefore, only a different version of the daily struggle be- tween light and darkness. But Prof. Max Muller's theory re- quires us to assume that this misconception or the corruption of Tṛita (तृत) into Trita (त्रित) took place before the Aryan separation, inasmuch as in Old Irish we have the word triath which means the sea, and which is phonetically equivalent to Greek triton, Sanskrit trita and Zend thrita. Prof. Max Muller himself admits the validity of this objection, and points out that the Old Norse Thridi, a name of Odin, as the mate of Har and Jasnhar, can be accounted for only on the supposition that tṛita (तृत) was changed by a misapprehen- sion into trita (त्रित) long before the Aryan separation. This shows to what straits scholars are reduced in explaining certain myths in the absence of the true key to their meaning. We assume, without the slightest authority, that a mis- apprehension must have taken place before the Aryan separa- tion, because we cannot explain why a deity was called