THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS.pdf

THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS

Being Also a New Key to the Interpretation of

Many Vedic Texts and Legends

Lokamanya Bâl Gangâdhar Tilak

The proprietor of the Kesari and the Mahratta newspapers,

The author of the Orion or Researches into the Antiquity of the Vedas,

The Gita Rahasya ( a Book on Hindu Philosophy ) etc., etc.

Publishers

Messrs. TILAK BROS

Gaikwar Wada

Poona City

1903

CONTENTS

Chapter

Page

Preface......................................................

i-ix

I Prehistoric Times ...............................................

II The Glacial Period .............................................

III The Arctic Regions ............................................

IV The Night of the Gods .......................................

V The Vedic Dawns ..............................................

VI Long Day and Long Night ..................................

113

VII Months and Seasons .........................................

136

VIII The Cows’ Walk ................................................

173

IX Vedic Myths — The Captive Waters .................

216

X Vedic Myths — The Matutinal Deities ...............

276

XI The Avestic Evidence ........................................

328

XII Comparative Mythology .....................................

364

XIII The Bearing of Our Results on the History of

Primitive Aryan Culture and Religion ................

385

Index .........................................................

433

PREFACE

The present volume is a sequel to my Orion or Researches into

the Antiquity of the Vedas , published in 1893. The estimate of Vedic

antiquity then generally current amongst Vedic scholars was based

on the assignment of arbitrary period of time to the different strata

into which the Vedic literature is divided; and it was believed that the

oldest of these strata could not, at the best, be older than 2400 B.C.

In my Orion , however, I tried to show that all such estimates, besides

being too modest, were vague and uncertain, and that the

astronomical statements found in the Vedic literature supplied us with

far more reliable data for correctly ascertaining the ages of the

different periods of Vedic literature. These astronomical statements, it

was further shown, unmistakably pointed out that the Vernal equinox

was in the constellation of Mṛiga or Orion (about 4500 B.C.) during

the period of the Vedic hymns, and that it had receded to the

constellation of the Kṛittikâs, or the Pleiades (about 2500 B.C.) in the

days of the Brâhmanas. Naturally enough these results were, at first,

received by scholars in a skeptical spirit. But my position was

strengthened when it was found that Dr. Jacobi, of Bonn, had

independently arrived at the same conclusion, and, soon after,

scholars like Prof. Bloomfield, M. Barth, the late Dr. Bulher and

others, more or less freely, acknowledged the force of my arguments.

Dr. Thibaut, the late Dr. Whitney and a few others were, however, of

opinion that the evidence adduced by me was not conclusive. But the

subsequent discovery, by my friend the late Mr. S. B. Dixit, of a

passage in the Shatapatha Brâhmana, plainly stating that the Kṛittikâs

never swerved, in those days, from the due east i.e., the Vernal

equinox, has served to dispel all lingering doubts regarding the age of

the Brâhmanas; while another Indian astronomer, Mr. V. B. Ketkar, in

a recent number of the Journal

of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, has

mathematically worked out the statement in the Taittirîya Brâhmana

(III, 1, 1, 5), that Bṛihaspati, or the planet Jupiter, was first discovered

when confronting or nearly occulting the star Tishya, and shown that

the observation was possible only at about 4650 B.C., thereby

remarkably confirming my estimate of the oldest period of Vedic

literature. After this, the high antiquity of the oldest Vedic period may,

I think, be now taken as fairly established.

But if the age of the oldest Vedic period was thus carried back

to 4500 B.C., one was still tempted to ask whether we had, in that

limit, reached the Ultima Thule of the Aryan antiquity. For, as stated

by Prof. Bloomfield, while noticing my Orion in his address on the

occasion of the eighteenth anniversary of John Hopkin’s University,

“the language and literature of the Vedas is, by no means, so

primitive as to place with it the real beginnings of Aryan life.” “These

in all probability and in all due moderation,” he rightly observed,

“reach back several thousands of years more,” and it was, he said,

therefore “needless to point out that this curtain, which seems to shut

off our vision at 4500 B.C., may prove in the end a veil of thin gauze.”

I myself held the same view, and much of my spare time during the

last ten years has been devoted to the search of evidence which

would lift up this curtain and reveal to us the long vista of primitive

Aryan antiquity. How I first worked on the lines followed up in Orion ,

how in the light of latest researches in geology and. archeology

bearing on the primitive history of man, I was gradually led to a

different line of search, and finally how the conclusion, that the

ancestors of the Vedic يishis lived in an Arctic home in inter-Glacial

times, was forced on me by the slowly accumulating mass of Vedic

and Avestic evidence, is fully narrated in the book, and need not,

therefore, be repeated in this place. I desire, however, to take this

opportunity of gratefully acknowledging the generous sympathy

shown to me at a critical time by that venerable scholar Prof. F. Max

Müller, whose recent death was mourned as a personal loss

iii

by his numerous admirers throughout India. This is not the place

where we may, with propriety, discuss the merits of the policy

adopted by the Bombay Government in 1897 Suffice it to say that in

order to put down certain public excitement, caused by its own famine

and plague policy, the Government of the day deemed it prudent to

prosecute some Vernacular papers in the province, and prominently

amongst them the Kesari , edited by me, for writings which were held

to be seditious, and I was awarded eighteen months’ rigorous

imprisonment. But political offenders in India are not treated better

than ordinary convicts, and had it not been for the sympathy and

interest taken by Prof. Max Müller, who knew me only as the author

of Orion , and other friends, I should have been deprived of the

pleasure, — then the only pleasure, — of following up my studies in

these days. Prof. Max Müller was kind enough to send me a copy of

his second edition of the يig-Veda, and the Government was pleased

to allow me the use of these and other books, and also of light to read

for a few hours at night. Some of the passages from the يig-Veda,

quoted in support, of the Arctic theory in the following pages, were

collected during such leisure as I could get in these times. It was

mainly through the efforts of Prof. Max Müller, backed by the whole.

Indian press, that I was released after twelve months; and in the very

first letter I wrote to Prof. Max Müller after my release, I thanked him

sincerely for his disinterested kindness, and also gave him a brief

summary of my new theory regarding the primitive Aryan home as

disclosed by Vedic evidence. It was, of course, not to be expected

that a scholar, who had worked all his life on a different line, would

accept the new view at once, and that too on reading a bare outline

off the evidence in its support. Still it was encouraging to hear from

him that though the interpretations of Vedic passages proposed by

me were probable, yet my theory appeared to be in conflict with the

established geological facts. I wrote in reply that I had already

examined the question from that stand-point, and expected soon to

place before him the whole evidence in support of my view. But,

unfortunately

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