Sri Aurobindo: Chapter XVIII The Human Fathers T  HESE characteristics of the Angiras Rishis seem at ﬁrst sight to indicate that they are in the Vedic system a class of demigods, in their outward aspect personiﬁcations or rather personalities of the Light and the Voice and the Flame, but in their inner aspect powers of the Truth who second the gods in their battles. But even as divine seers, even as sons of Heaven and heroes of the Lord, these sages represent aspiring humanity. True, they are originally the sons of the gods, devaputr¯ah., children of Agni, forms of the manifoldly born Brihaspati, and in their ascent to the world of the Truth they are described as ascending back to the place from whence they came; but even in these characteristics they may well be representative of the human soul which has itself descended from that world and has to reascend; for it is in its origin a mental being, son of immortality (amr.tasya putrah.), a child of Heaven born in Heaven and mortal only in the bodies that it assumes.


Sri Aurobindo: And the part of the Angiras Rishis in the sacriﬁce is the human part, to ﬁnd the word, to sing the hymn of the soul to the gods, to sustain and increase the divine Powers by the praise, the sacred food and the Soma-wine, to bring to birth by their aid the divine Dawn, to win the luminous forms of the all-radiating Truth and to ascend to its secret, far and high-seated home.  In this work of the sacriﬁce they appear in a double form,1 the divine Angirases, r.s.ayo divy¯ah., who symbolise and preside over certain psychological powers and workings like the gods, and the human fathers, pitaro manus.y¯ah., who like the Ribhus, also described as human beings or at least human powers that 1 It is to be noted that the Puranas distinguish speciﬁcally between two classes of Pitris, the divine Fathers, a class of deities, and the human Ancestors, to both of whom the pin.d.a is offered. The Puranas, obviously, only continue in this respect the original Vedic tradition.    have conquered immortality by the work, have attained the goal and are invoked to assist a later mortal race in the same divine achievement.


Sri Aurobindo: Quite apart from the later Yama hymns of the tenth Mandala in which the Angirases are spoken of as Barhishad Pitris along with the Bhrigus and Atharvans and receive their own peculiar portion in the sacriﬁce, they are in the rest of the Veda also called upon in a less deﬁnite but a larger and more signiﬁcant imagery. It is for the great human journey that they are invoked; for it is the human journey from the mortality to the immortality, from the falsehood to the truth that the Ancestors accomplished, opening the way to their descendants.  We see this characteristic of their working in VII.42 and VII.52. The ﬁrst of these two hymns of Vasishtha is a Sukta in which the gods are invoked precisely for this great journey, adhvara yaj˜na,2 the sacriﬁce that travels or is a travel to the home of the godheads and at the same time a battle: for thus it is sung, “Easy of travelling for thee is the path, O Agni, and known to thee from of old. Yoke in the Soma-offering thy ruddy (or, actively-moving) mares which bear the hero.


Sri Aurobindo: Seated, I call the births divine” (verse 2). What path is this? It is the path between the home of the gods and our earthly mortality down which the gods descend through the antariks.a, the vital regions, to the earthly sacriﬁce and up which the sacriﬁce and man by the sacriﬁce ascends to the home of the gods. Agni yokes his mares, his variously-coloured energies or ﬂames of the divine Force he represents, which bear the Hero, the battling power within us that performs the journey. And the births divine are at once the gods themselves and those manifestations of the divine life in man which are the Vedic meaning of the godheads.


Sri Aurobindo: That this is the sense becomes clear from the fourth Rik. “When the 2 Sayana takes a-dhvara yaj˜na, the unhurt sacriﬁce; but “unhurt” can never have come to be used as a synonym of sacriﬁce. Adhvara is “travelling”, “moving”, connected with adhvan, a path or journey from the lost root adh, to move, extend, be wide, compact, etc. We see the connection between the two words adhvan and adhvara in adhva, air, sky and adhvara with the same sense. The passages in the Veda are numerous in which the adhvara or adhvara yaj˜na is connected with the idea of travelling, journeying, advancing on the path.


Sri Aurobindo: The Human Fathers    Guest that lodges in the bliss has become conscious in knowledge in the gated house of the hero rich (in felicity), when Agni is perfectly satisﬁed and ﬁrmly lodged in the house, then he gives the desirable good to the creature that makes the journey” or, it may be, for his journeying.  The hymn is therefore an invocation to Agni for the journey to the supreme good, the divine birth, the bliss.


Sri Aurobindo: And its opening verse is a prayer for the necessary conditions of the journey, the things that are said here to constitute the form of the pilgrim sacriﬁce, adhvarasya pe´sah., and among these comes ﬁrst the forward movement of the Angirases; “Forward let the Angirases travel, priests of the Word, forward go the cry of heaven (or, of the heavenly thing, cloud or lightning),  forward move the fostering Cows that diffuse their waters, and let the two pressing-stones be yoked (to their work) — the form of the pilgrim sacriﬁce,” pra brahm¯an.o a˙ngiraso naks.anta, pra krandanur nabhanyasya vetu; pra dhenava udapruto navanta, yujy¯at¯am adr¯ı adhvarasya pe´sah.. The Angirases with the divine Word, the cry of Heaven which is the voice of Swar the luminous heaven and of its lightnings thundering out from the Word, the divine waters or seven rivers that are set free to their ﬂowing by that heavenly lightning of Indra the master of Swar, and with the outﬂowing of the divine waters the outpressing of the immortalising Soma, these constitute the form, pe´sah., of the adhvara yaj˜na. And its general characteristic is forward movement, the advance of all to the divine goal, as emphasised by the three verbs of motion, naks.anta, vetu, navanta and the emphatic pra, forward, which opens and sets the key to each clause.  But the ﬁfty-second hymn is still more signiﬁcant and suggestive.


Sri Aurobindo: The ﬁrst Rik runs, “O Sons of the inﬁnite Mother (¯adity¯aso), may we become inﬁnite beings (aditayah. sy¯ama), may the Vasus protect in the godhead and the mortality (devatr¯a martyatr¯a); possessing may we possess you, O Mitra and Varuna, becoming may we become you, O Heaven and Earth,” sanema mitr¯avarun. ¯a sananto, bhavema dy¯av¯apr.thiv¯ı bhavantah.. This is evidently the sense that we are to possess and become the inﬁnities or children of Aditi, the godheads,   aditayah., ¯adity¯aso. Mitra and Varuna, we must remember, are powers of Surya Savitri, the Lord of the Light and the Truth.  And the third verse runs, “May the Angirases who hasten through to the goal move in their travelling to the bliss of the divine Savitri; and that (bliss) may our great Father, he of the sacriﬁce, and all the gods becoming of one mind accept in heart.”


Sri Aurobindo: Turan.yavo naks.anta ratna ˙m devasya savitur iy¯an¯ah.. It is quite clear therefore that the Angirases are travellers to the light and truth of the solar deity from which are born the luminous cows they wrest from the Panis and to the bliss which, as we always see, is founded on that light and truth. It is clear also that this journey is a growing into the godhead, into the inﬁnite being (aditayah. sy¯ama), said in this hymn (verse 2) to come by the growth of the peace and bliss through the action in us of Mitra, Varuna and the Vasus who protect us in the godhead and the mortality.  In these two hymns the Angiras Rishis generally are mentioned; but in others we have positive references to the human Fathers who ﬁrst discovered the Light and possessed the Thought and the Word and travelled to the secret worlds of the luminous Bliss. In the light of the conclusions at which we have arrived, we can now study the more important passages, profound, beautiful and luminous, in which this great discovery of the human forefathers is hymned.


Sri Aurobindo: We shall ﬁnd there the summary of that great hope which the Vedic mystics held ever before their eyes; that journey, that victory is the ancient, primal achievement set as a type by the luminous Ancestors for the mortality that was to come after them. It was the conquest of the powers of the circumscribing Night (r¯atr¯ı paritakmy¯a), Vritras, Sambaras and Valas, the Titans, Giants, Pythons, subconscient Powers who hold the light and the force in themselves, in their cities of darkness and illusion, but can neither use it aright nor will give it up to man, the mental being. Their ignorance, evil and limitation have not merely to be cut away from us, but broken up and into and made to yield up the secret of light and good and inﬁnity. Out of this death that immortality has to be conquered. Pent up behind this ignorance is a secret knowledge  The Human Fathers  and a great light of truth; prisoned by this evil is an inﬁnite content of good; in this limiting death is the seed of a boundless immortality.


Sri Aurobindo: Vala, for example, is Vala of the radiances, vala ˙m gomantam, his body is made of the light, govapus.a ˙m valam, his hole or cave is a city full of treasures; that body has to be broken up, that city rent open, those treasures seized. This is the work set for humanity and the Ancestors have done it for the race that the way may be known and the goal reached by the same means and through the same companionship with the gods of Light. “Let there be that ancient friendship between you gods and us as when with the Angirases who spoke aright the word, thou didst make to fall that which was ﬁxed and slewest Vala as he rushed against thee, O achiever of works, and thou didst make to swing open all the doors of his city” (VI.18.5). At the beginning of all human traditions there is this ancient memory.  It is Indra and the serpent Vritra, it is Apollo and the Python, it is Thor and the Giants, Sigurd and Fafner, it is the mutually opposing gods of the Celtic mythology; but only in the Veda do we ﬁnd the key to this imagery which conceals the hope or the wisdom of a prehistoric humanity.


Sri Aurobindo: The ﬁrst hymn we will take is one by the great Rishi, Vishwamitra, III.39; for it carries us right into the heart of our subject.  It sets out with a description of the ancestral Thought, pitry¯a dh¯ıh., the Thought of the fathers which can be no other than the Swar-possessing thought hymned by the Atris, the seven-headed thought discovered by Ayasya for the Navagwas; for in this hymn also it is spoken of in connection with the Angirases, the Fathers. “The thought expressing itself from the heart, formed into the Stoma, goes towards Indra its lord.” Indra is, we have supposed, the Power of luminous Mind, master of the world of Light and its lightnings; the words or the thoughts are constantly imaged as cows or women, Indra as the Bull or husband, and the words desire him and are even spoken of as casting themselves upwards to seek him, e.g. I.9.4, girah. prati


Sri Aurobindo: tv¯am ud ah¯asata  vr.s.abha ˙m patim .


Sri Aurobindo: The luminous Mind of Swar is the goal sought by the Vedic thought and the Vedic speech which express the herd of the illuminations pressing upward from the soul, from   the cave of the subconscient in which they were penned; Indra master of Swar is the Bull, the lord of these herds, gopatih..  The Rishi continues to describe the Thought. It is “the thought that when it is being expressed, remains wakeful in the knowledge,” does not lend itself to the slumber of the Panis, y¯a j¯agr.vir vidathe ´sasyam¯an¯a; “that which is born of thee (or, for thee), O Indra, of that take knowledge.” This is a constant formula in the Veda. The god, the divine, has to take cognizance of what rises up to him in man, to become awake to it in the knowledge within us, (viddhi, cetathah., etc.), otherwise it remains a human thing and does not “go to the gods”, (deves.u gacchati).


Sri Aurobindo: And then, “It is ancient (or eternal), it is born from heaven; when it is being expressed, it remains wakeful in the knowledge; wearing white and happy robes, this in us is the ancient thought of the fathers,” seyam asme sanaj¯a pitry¯a dh¯ıh..  And then the Rishi speaks of this Thought as “the mother of twins, who here gives birth to the twins; on the tip of the tongue it descends and stands; the twin bodies when they are born cleave to each other and are slayers of darkness and move in the foundation of burning force.” I will not now discuss what are these luminous twins, for that would carry us beyond the limits of our immediate subject: sufﬁce it to say that they are spoken of elsewhere in connection with the Angirases and their establishment of the supreme birth (the plane of the Truth) as the twins in whom Indra places the word of the expression (I.83.3), that the burning force in whose foundation they move is evidently that of the Sun, the slayer of darkness, and this foundation is therefore identical with the supreme plane, the foundation of the Truth, r.tasya budhnah., and, ﬁnally, that they can hardly be wholly unconnected with the twin children of Surya, Yama and Yami, — Yama who in the tenth Mandala is associated with the Angiras Rishis.3  Having thus described the ancestral thought with its twin 3 It is in the light of these facts that we must understand the colloquy of Yama and Yami in the tenth Mandala in which the sister seeks union with her brother and is put off to later generations, meaning really symbolic periods of time, the word for later signifying rather “higher”, uttara.   The Human Fathers  children, slayers of darkness, Vishwamitra proceeds to speak of the ancient Fathers who ﬁrst formed it and of the great victory by which they discovered “that Truth, the sun lying in the darkness”.


Sri Aurobindo: “None is there among mortals who can blame (or, as it rather seems to me to mean, no power of mortality that can conﬁne or bind) our ancient fathers, they who were ﬁghters for the cows; Indra of the mightiness, Indra of the achievement released upward for them the fortiﬁed pens, — there where, a comrade with his comrades, the ﬁghters, the Navagwas, following on his knees the cows, Indra with the ten Dashagwas found that Truth, satya ˙m tad, even the sun dwelling in the darkness.” This is the usual image of the conquest of the luminous cattle and the discovery of the hidden Sun; but in the next verse it is associated with two other related images which also occur frequently in the Vedic hymns, the pasture or ﬁeld of the cow and the honey found in the cow. “Indra found the honey stored in the Shining One, the footed and hoofed (wealth) in the pasture4 of the Cow.” The Shining One, usriy¯a (also usr¯a), is another word which like go means both ray and cow and is used as a synonym of go in the Veda. We hear constantly of the ghr.ta or clariﬁed butter stored in the cow, hidden there by the Panis in three portions according to Vamadeva; but it is sometimes the honeyed ghr.ta and sometimes simply the honey, madhumad ghr.tam and madhu.


Sri Aurobindo: We have seen how closely the yield of the cow, the ghr.ta, and the yield of the Soma plant are connected in other hymns and now that we know deﬁnitely what is meant by the Cow, this strange and incongruous connection becomes clear and simple enough. Ghr.ta also means shining, it is the shining yield of the shining cow; it is the formed light of conscious knowledge in the mentality which is stored in the illumined consciousness and it is liberated by the liberation of the Cow: Soma is the delight, beatitude, Ananda inseparable from the illumined state of the being; and as there are, according to the Veda, three planes of mentality in us, so there are three portions of the ghr.ta dependent on the 4 Name goh.. Nama from nam to move, range, Greek nem¯o; nama is the range, pasture, Greek nomos.    three gods Surya, Indra and Soma, and the Soma also is offered in three parts, on the three levels of the hill, tris.u s¯anus.u. We may hazard the conjecture, having regard to the nature of the three gods, that Soma releases the divine light from the sense mentality, Indra from the dynamic mentality, Surya from the pure reﬂective mentality.


Sri Aurobindo: As for the pasture of the cow we are already familiar with it; it is the ﬁeld or ks.etra which Indra wins for his shining comrades from the Dasyu and in which the Atri beheld the warrior Agni and the luminous cows, those of whom even the old became young again. This ﬁeld, ks.etra, is only another image for the luminous home (ks.aya) to which the gods by the sacriﬁce lead the human soul.  Vishwamitra then proceeds to indicate the real mystic sense of all this imagery. “He having Dakshina with him held in his right hand (daks.in.e daks.in. ¯av¯an) the secret thing that is placed in the secret cave and concealed in the waters. May he, knowing perfectly, separate the light from the darkness, jyotir vr.n.¯ıta tamaso vij¯anan, may we be far from the presence of the evil.”


Sri Aurobindo: We have here a clue to the sense of this goddess Dakshina who seems in some passages to be a form or epithet of the Dawn and in others that which distributes the offerings in the sacriﬁce.  Usha is the divine illumination and Dakshina is the discerning knowledge that comes with the dawn and enables the Power in the mind, Indra, to know aright and separate the light from the darkness, the truth from the falsehood, the straight from the crooked, vr.n.¯ıta vij¯anan. The right and left hand of Indra are his two powers of action in knowledge; for his two arms are called gabhasti, a word which means ordinarily a ray of the sun but also forearm, and they correspond to his two perceptive powers, his two bright horses, har¯ı, which are described as suneyed, s¯uracaks.as¯a and as vision-powers of the Sun, s¯uryasya ket¯u. Dakshina presides over the right-hand power, daks.in.a, and therefore we have the collocation daks.in.e daks.in. ¯av¯an. It is this discernment which presides over the right action of the sacriﬁce and the right distribution of the offerings and it is this which enables Indra to hold the herded wealth of the Panis securely, in his right hand.


Sri Aurobindo: And ﬁnally we are told what is this secret thing  The Human Fathers  that was placed for us in the cave and is concealed in the waters of being, the waters in which the Thought of the Fathers has to be set, apsu dhiya ˙m dadhis.e. It is the hidden Sun, the secret Light of our divine existence which has to be found and taken out by knowledge from the darkness in which it is concealed.  That this light is not physical is shown by the word vij¯anan, for it is through right knowledge that it has to be found, and by the moral result, viz. that we go far from the presence of evil, durit¯ad, literally, the wrong going, the stumbling to which we are subjected in the night of our being before the sun has been found, before the divine Dawn has arisen.  Once we have the key to the meaning of the Cows, the Sun, the Honey-Wine, all the circumstances of the Angiras legend and the action of the Fathers, which are such an incongruous patchwork in the ritualistic or naturalistic and so hopelessly impossible in the historical or Arya-Dravidian interpretation of the hymns, become on the contrary perfectly clear and connected  and each throws light on the other.


Sri Aurobindo: We understand each hymn in its entirety and in relation to other hymns; each isolated line, each passage, each scattered reference in the Vedas falls inevitably and harmoniously into a common whole. We know, here, how the Honey, the Bliss can be said to be stored in the Cow, the shining Light of the Truth; what is the connection of the honey-bearing Cow with the Sun, lord and origin of that Light; why the discovery of the Sun dwelling in the darkness is connected with the conquest or recovery of the cows of the Panis by the Angirases; why it is called the discovery of that Truth; what is meant by the footed and hoofed wealth and the ﬁeld or pasture of the Cow. We begin to see what is the cave of the Panis and why that which is hidden in the lair of Vala is said also to be hidden in the waters released by Indra from the hold of Vritra, the seven rivers possessed by the seven-headed heaven-conquering thought of Ayasya; why the rescue of the sun out of the cave, the separation or choosing of the light out of the darkness is said to be done by an all-discerning knowledge; who are Dakshina and Sarama and what is meant by Indra holding the hoofed wealth in his right hand. And in arriving at   these conclusions we have not to wrest the sense of words, to interpret the same ﬁxed term by different renderings according to our convenience of the moment or to render differently the same phrase or line in different hymns, or to make incoherence a standard of right interpretation; on the contrary, the greater the ﬁdelity to word and form of the Riks, the more conspicuously the general and the detailed sense of the Veda emerge in a constant clearness and fullness.  We have therefore acquired the right to apply the sense we have discovered to other passages such as the hymn of Vasishtha which I shall next examine, VII.76, although to a superﬁcial glance it would seem to be only an ecstatic picture of the physical Dawn.


Sri Aurobindo: This ﬁrst impression, however, disappears when we examine it; we see that there is a constant suggestion of a profounder meaning and, the moment we apply the key we have found, the harmony of the real sense appears. The hymn commences with a description of that rising of the Sun into the light of the supreme Dawn which is brought about by the gods and the Angirases. “Savitri, the god, the universal Male, has ascended into the Light that is immortal and of all the births, jyotir amr.ta ˙m vi´svajanyam; by the work (of sacriﬁce) the eye of the gods has been born (or, by the will-power of the gods vision has been born); Dawn has manifested the whole world (or, all that comes into being, all existences, vi´sva ˙m bhuvanam).” This immortal light into which the sun rises is elsewhere called the true light, r.ta ˙m jyotih., Truth and immortality being constantly associated in the Veda. It is the light of the knowledge given by the seven-headed thought which Ayasya discovered when he became vi´svajanya, universal in his being; therefore this light too is called vi´svajanya, for it belongs to the fourth plane, the tur¯ıya ˙m svid of Ayasya, from which all the rest are born and by whose truth all the rest are manifested in their large universality and no longer in the limited terms of the falsehood and crookedness.


Sri Aurobindo: Therefore it is called also the eye of the gods and the divine dawn that makes manifest the whole of existence.  The result of this birth of divine vision is that man’s path manifests itself to him and those journeyings of the gods or to  The Human Fathers  the gods (devay¯an¯ah.) which lead to the inﬁnite wideness of the divine existence. “Before me the paths of the journeyings of the gods have become visible, journeyings that violate not, whose movement was formed by the Vasus. The eye of Dawn has come into being in front and she has come towards us (arriving) over our houses.” The house in the Veda is the constant image for the bodies that are dwelling-places of the soul, just as the ﬁeld or habitation means the planes to which it mounts and in which it rests.


Sri Aurobindo: The path of man is that of his journey to the supreme plane and that which the journeyings of the gods do not violate is, as we see, in the ﬁfth verse where the phrase is repeated, the workings of the gods, the divine law of life into which the soul has to grow. We have then a curious image which seems to support the Arctic theory. “Many were those days which were before the rising of the Sun (or which were of old by the rising of the Sun), in which thou, O Dawn, wert seen as if moving about thy lover and not coming again.” This is certainly a picture of continual dawns, not interrupted by Night, such as are visible in the Arctic regions. The psychological sense which arises out of the verse, is obvious.


Sri Aurobindo: What were these dawns? They were those created by the actions of the Fathers, the ancient Angirases. “They indeed had the joy (of the Soma) along with the gods,5 the ancient seers who possessed the truth; the fathers found the hidden Light; they, having the true thought (satyamantr¯ah., the true thought expressed in the inspired Word), brought into being the Dawn.”  And to what did the Dawn, the path, the divine journeying lead the Fathers? To the level wideness, sam¯ane ¯urve, termed elsewhere the unobstructed vast, urau anib¯adhe, which is evidently the same as that wide being or world which, according to Kanwa, men create when they slay Vritra and pass beyond heaven and earth; it is the vast Truth and the inﬁnite being of Aditi.


Sri Aurobindo: “In the level wideness they meet together and unite their knowledge (or, know perfectly) and strive not together; they 5 I adopt provisionally the traditional rendering of sadham¯adah. though I am not sure that it is the correct rendering.    diminish not (limit not or hurt not) the workings of the gods, not violating them they move (to their goal) by (the strength of) the Vasus.” It is evident that the seven Angirases, whether human or divine, represent different principles of the Knowledge, Thought or Word, the seven-headed thought, the seven-mouthed word of Brihaspati, and in the level wideness these are harmonised in a universal knowledge; the error, crookedness, falsehood by which men violate the workings of the gods and by which different principles of their being, consciousness, knowledge enter into confused conﬂict with each other, have been removed by the eye or vision of the divine Dawn.


Sri Aurobindo: The hymn closes with the aspiration of the Vasishthas towards this divine and blissful Dawn as leader of the herds and mistress of plenty and again as leader of the felicity and the truths (s¯unr.t¯an¯am). They desire to arrive at the same achievement as the primal seers, the fathers and it would follow that these are the human and not the divine Angirases. In any case the sense of the Angiras legend is ﬁxed in all its details, except the exact identity of the Panis and the hound Sarama, and we can turn to the consideration of the passages in the opening hymns of the fourth Mandala in which the human fathers are explicitly mentioned and their achievement described. These hymns of Vamadeva are the most illuminating and important for this aspect of the Angiras legend and they are in themselves among the most interesting in the Rig Veda.   Chapter XIX The Victory of the Fathers


Sri Aurobindo: T  HE HYMNS addressed by the great Rishi Vamadeva to the divine Flame, to the Seer-Will, Agni are among the most mystic in expression in the Rig Veda and though quite plain in their sense if we hold ﬁrmly in our mind the system of signiﬁcant ﬁgures employed by the Rishis, will otherwise seem only a brilliant haze of images bafﬂing our comprehension. The reader has at every moment to apply that ﬁxed notation which is the key to the sense of the hymns; otherwise he will be as much at a loss as a reader of metaphysics who has not mastered the sense of the philosophical terms that are being constantly used or, let us say, one who tries to read Panini’s Sutras without knowing the peculiar system of grammatical notation in which they are expressed. We have, however, already enough light upon this system of images to understand well enough what Vamadeva has to tell us about the great achievement of the human forefathers.


Sri Aurobindo: In order to hold clearly in our minds at the start what that great achievement was we may put before ourselves the clear and sufﬁcient formulas in which Parashara Shaktya expresses them. “Our fathers broke open the ﬁrm and strong places by their words, yea, the Angirases broke open the hill by their cry; they made in us the path to the great heaven; they found the Day and Swar and vision and the luminous Cows,” cakrur divo br.hato g¯atum asme, ahah. svar vividuh. ketum usr¯ah., (I.71.2).  This path, he tells us, is the path which leads to immortality;


Sri Aurobindo: “they who entered into all things that bear right fruit formed a path towards the immortality; earth stood wide for them by the greatness and by the Great Ones, the mother Aditi with her sons came (or, manifested herself) for the upholding” (I.72.9).1 That 1 ¯A ye vi´sv¯a


Sri Aurobindo: svapaty¯ani tasthuh., kr.n.v¯an¯aso amr.tatv¯aya g¯atum; mahn¯a mahadbhih.  pr.thiv¯ı vi tasthe, m¯at¯a putrair aditir dh¯ayase veh..    is to say, the physical being visited by the greatness of the inﬁnite planes above and by the power of the great godheads who reign on those planes breaks its limits, opens out to the Light and is upheld in its new wideness by the inﬁnite Consciousness, mother Aditi, and her sons, the divine Powers of the supreme Deva. This is the Vedic immortality.  The means of this ﬁnding and expanding are also very succinctly stated by Parashara in his mystic, but still clear and impressive style.


Sri Aurobindo: “They held the truth, they enriched its thought; then indeed, aspiring souls (aryah.), they, holding it in thought, bore it diffused in all their being,” dadhann r.ta ˙m dhanayann asya dh¯ıtim, ¯ad id aryo didhis.vo vibhr.tr¯ah., (I.71.3). The image in vibhr.tr¯ah. suggests the upholding of the thought of the Truth in all the principles of our being or, to put it in the ordinary Vedic image, the seven-headed thought in all the seven waters, apsu dhiya ˙m dadhis.e, as we have seen it elsewhere expressed in almost identical language; this is shown by the image that immediately follows, — “the doers of the work go towards the unthirsting (waters) which increase the divine births by the satisfaction of delight,” atr.s.yant¯ır apaso yanti acch¯a, dev¯an janma prayas¯a vardhayant¯ıh.. The sevenfold Truth-consciousness in the satisﬁed sevenfold Truth-being increasing the divine births in us by the satisfaction of the soul’s hunger for the Beatitude, this is the growth of immortality. It is the manifestation of that trinity of divine being, light and bliss which the Vedantins afterwards called Sachchidananda.  The sense of this universal diffusion of Truth and the birth and activity of all the godheads in us assuring a universal and immortal life in place of our present limited mortality is made yet clearer by Parashara in I.68.


Sri Aurobindo: Agni, the divine Seer-Will, is described as ascending to heaven and unrolling the veil of the nights from all that is stable and all that is mobile, “when he becomes the one God encompassing all these godheads with the greatness of his being. Then indeed all accept and cleave to the Will (or the Work) when, O godhead, thou art born a living soul from the dryness (i.e. from the material being, the desert, as it is called, unwatered by the streams of the Truth);  The Victory of the Fathers  all enjoy godhead attaining to the truth and the immortality by their movements, bhajanta vi´sve devatva ˙m n¯ama, r.ta ˙m sapanto amr.tam evaih.. The impulse of the Truth, the thinking of the Truth becomes a universal life (or pervades all the life), and in it all fulﬁl their workings,” r.tasya pres. ¯a r.tasya dh¯ıtir, vi´sv¯ayur vi´sve ap¯a ˙msi cakruh..  And in order that we may not, haunted by the unfortunate misconstruction of the Veda which European scholarship has imposed on the modern mind, carry with us the idea of the seven earthly rivers of the Punjab into the super-terrestrial achievement of the human forefathers, we will note what Parashara in his clear and illuminating fashion tells us about the seven rivers.


Sri Aurobindo: “The fostering cows of the Truth (dhenavah., an image applied to the rivers, while g¯avah. or usr¯ah. expresses the luminous cows of the Sun) nourished him, lowing, with happy udders, enjoyed in heaven; obtaining right thinking as a boon from the supreme (plane) the rivers ﬂowed wide and evenly over the hill,” r.tasya hi dhenavo v¯ava´s¯an¯ah., smad¯udhn¯ıh. p¯ıpayanta   dyubhakt¯ah.; par¯avatah .


Sri Aurobindo: sumati ˙m bhiks.am¯an. ¯a, vi sindhavah.  samay¯a sasrur adrim, (I.73.6). And in I.72.8, speaking of them in a phrase which is applied to the rivers in other hymns, he says, “The seven mighty ones of heaven, placing aright the thought, knowing the Truth, discerned in knowledge the doors of felicity; Sarama found the fastness, the wideness of the luminous cows; thereby the human creature enjoys the bliss,” sv¯adhyo diva ¯a sapta yahv¯ı, r¯ayo duro vi r.taj˜n¯a aj¯anan; vidad gavya ˙m saram¯a dr.d.ham ¯urva ˙m, yen¯a nu ka ˙m m¯anus.¯ı bhojate vit.. These are evidently not the waters of the Punjab, but the rivers of Heaven, the streams of the Truth,2 goddesses like Saraswati, who possess the Truth in knowledge and open by it the doors of the beatitude to the human creature.


Sri Aurobindo: We see here too what I have already insisted on, that there is a close connection between the ﬁnding of the Cows and the outﬂowing of the Rivers; they are parts 2 Note that in I.32 Hiranyastupa Angirasa describes the waters released from Vritra as “ascending the mind”, mano ruh¯an. ¯ah., and elsewhere they are called the waters that have the knowledge, ¯apo vicetasah. (I.83.1) .


Sri Aurobindo: of one action, the achievement of the truth and immortality by men, r.ta ˙m sapanto amr.tam evaih..  It is now perfectly clear that the achievement of the Angirases is the conquest of the Truth and the Immortality, that Swar called also the great heaven, br.hat dyauh., is the plane of the Truth above the ordinary heaven and earth which can be no other than the ordinary mental and physical being; that the path of the great heaven, the path of the Truth created by the Angirases and followed by the hound Sarama is the path to the Immortality, amr.tatv¯aya g¯atum; that the vision (ketu) of the Dawn, the Day won by the Angirases, is the vision proper to the Truth-consciousness; that the luminous cows of the Sun and Dawn wrested from the Panis are the illuminations of this truth-consciousness which help to form the thought of the Truth, r.tasya dh¯ıtih., complete in the seven-headed thought of Ayasya; that the Night of the Veda is the obscured consciousness of the mortal being in which the Truth is subconscient, hidden in the cave of the hill; that the recovery of the lost sun lying in this darkness of Night is the recovery of the sun of Truth out of the darkened subconscient condition; and that the downﬂowing earthward of the seven rivers must be the outstreaming action of the sevenfold principle of our being as it is formulated in the Truth of the divine or immortal existence. Equally then must the Panis be the powers that prevent the Truth from emerging out of the subconscient condition and that constantly strive to steal its illuminations from man and throw him back into the Night, and Vritra must be the power that obstructs and prevents the free movement of the illumined rivers of the Truth, obstructs the impulsion of the Truth in us, r.tasya pres. ¯a, the luminous impulsion, jyotis.mat¯ım is.am, which carries us beyond the Night to the immortality. And the gods, the sons of Aditi, must be on the contrary the luminous divine powers, born of the inﬁnite consciousness Aditi, whose formation and activity in our human and mortal being are necessary for our growth into the godhead, into the being of the Deva (devatvam) which is the Immortality.  Agni, the truth-conscious seer-will, is the principal godhead who enables us to effect the sacriﬁce; he leads it on the path of the  The Victory of the Fathers


Sri Aurobindo: Truth, he is the warrior of the battle, the doer of the work, and his unity and universality in us comprehending in itself all the other godheads is the basis of the Immortality. The plane of the Truth to which we arrive is his own home and the own home of the other gods, and the ﬁnal home also of the soul of man. And this immortality is described as a beatitude, a state of inﬁnite spiritual wealth and plenitude, ratna, rayi, v¯aja, r¯adhas, etc.; the opening doors of our divine home are the doors of the felicity, r¯ayo durah., the divine doors which swing wide open to those who increase the Truth (r.t¯avr.dhah.) and which are discovered for us by Saraswati and her sisters, by the seven Rivers, by Sarama; to them and to the wide pasture (ks.etra) in the unobstructed and equal inﬁnities of the vast Truth Brihaspati and Indra lead upward the shining Herds.  With these conceptions clearly ﬁxed in our minds we shall be able to understand the verses of Vamadeva which only repeat in symbolic language the substance of the thought expressed more openly by Parashara. It is to Agni the Seer-Will that Vamadeva’s opening hymns are addressed.


Sri Aurobindo: He is hymned as the friend or builder of man’s sacriﬁce who awakes him to the vision, the knowledge (ketu), sa cetayan manus.o yaj˜nabandhuh. (IV.1.9); so doing, “he dwells in the gated homes of this being, accomplishing; he, a god, has come to be the means of accomplishment of the mortal,” sa ks.eti asya dury¯asu s¯adhan, devo martasya sadhanitvam ¯apa. What is it that he accomplishes? The next verse tells us.


Sri Aurobindo: “May this Agni lead us in his knowledge towards that bliss of him which is enjoyed by the gods, that which by the thought all the immortals created and Dyauspita the father out-pouring the Truth”; sa t¯u no agnir nayatu praj¯anann, acch¯a ratna ˙m devabhakta ˙m yad asya; dhiy¯a yad vi´sve amr.t¯a akr.n.van, dyaus.pit¯a janit¯a satyam uks.an. This is Parashara’s beatitude of the Immortality created by all the powers of the immortal godhead doing their work in the thought of the Truth and in its impulsion, and the out-pouring of the Truth is evidently the out-pouring of the waters as is indicated by the word uks.an, Parashara’s equal diffusion of the seven rivers of the truth over the hill.    Vamadeva then goes on to tell us of the birth of this great, ﬁrst or supreme force, Agni, in the Truth, in its waters, in its original home. “He was born, the ﬁrst, in the waters, in the foundation of the vast world (Swar), in its womb, (i.e. its seat and birthplace, its original home); without head and feet, concealing his two extremities, setting himself to his work in the lair of the Bull.” The Bull is the Deva or Purusha, his lair is the plane of the Truth, and Agni the Seer-Will, working in the truth-consciousness, creates the worlds; but he conceals his two extremities, his head and feet


Sri Aurobindo: ; that is to say, his workings act between the superconscient and the subconscient in which his highest and his lowest states are respectively concealed, one in an utter light, the other in an utter darkness. From that he goes forth as the ﬁrst and supreme force and is born to the Bull or the Lord by the action of the seven powers of the Bliss, the seven Beloved. “He went forward by illumined knowledge as the ﬁrst force, in the seat of the Truth, in the lair of the Bull, desirable, young, full in body, shining wide; the seven Beloved bore him to the Lord.”  The Rishi then comes to the achievement of the human fathers, asm¯akam atra pitaro manus.y¯a, abhi pra sedur r.tam ¯a´sus. ¯an. ¯ah.: “Here our human fathers seeking possession of the Truth went forward to it; the bright cows in their covering prison, the good milkers whose pen is in the rock they drove upward (to the Truth), the Dawns answered their call.


Sri Aurobindo: They rent the hill asunder and made them bright; others all around them declared wide this (Truth) of theirs; drivers of the herds they sang the hymn to the doer of works (Agni), they found the light, they shone in their thoughts (or, they accomplished the work by their thoughts). They with the mind that seeks the light (the cows, gavyat¯a manas¯a) rent the ﬁrm and compact hill that environed the luminous cows; the souls that desire opened by the divine word, vacas¯a daivyena, the ﬁrm pen full of the kine.” These are the ordinary images of the Angiras legend, but in the next verse Vamadeva uses a still more mystic language.  “They conceived in mind the ﬁrst name of the fostering cows, they found the thrice seven supreme (seats) of the Mother; the  The Victory of the Fathers  females of the herd knew that and they followed after it; the ruddy one was manifested by the victorious attainment (or, the splendour) of the cow of Light,” te manvata prathama ˙m n¯ama dhenos, trih. sapta m¯atuh. param¯an.i vindan; taj j¯anat¯ır abhyan¯us.ata vr¯a, ¯avirbhuvad arun.¯ır ya´sas¯a goh..


Sri Aurobindo: The Mother here is Aditi, the inﬁnite consciousness, who is the Dhenu or fostering Cow with the seven rivers for her sevenfold streaming as well as Go the Cow of Light with the Dawns for her children; the Ruddy One is the divine Dawn and the herd or rays are her dawning illuminations. The ﬁrst name of the Mother with her thrice seven supreme seats, that which the dawns or mental illuminations know and move towards, must be the name or deity of the supreme Deva, who is inﬁnite being and inﬁnite consciousness and inﬁnite bliss, and the seats are the three divine worlds, called earlier in the hymn the three supreme births of Agni, Satya, Tapas and Jana of the Puranas, which correspond to these three inﬁnities of the Deva and each fulﬁls in its own way the sevenfold principle of our existence: thus we get the series of thrice seven seats of Aditi manifested in all her glory by the opening out of the Dawn of Truth.3 Thus we see that the achievement of the Light and Truth by the human fathers is also an ascent to the Immortality of the supreme and divine status, to the ﬁrst name of the all-creating inﬁnite Mother, to her thrice seven supreme degrees of this ascending existence, to the highest levels of the eternal hill (s¯anu, adri).  This immortality is the beatitude enjoyed by the gods of which Vamadeva has already spoken as the thing which Agni has to accomplish by the sacriﬁce, the supreme bliss with its thrice seven ecstasies (I.20.7). For he proceeds; “Vanished the darkness, shaken in its foundation; Heaven shone out (rocata dyauh., implying the manifestation of the three luminous worlds of Swar, divo rocan¯ani); upward rose the light of the divine Dawn; the Sun entered the vast ﬁelds (of the Truth) beholding the straight 3


Sri Aurobindo: The same idea is expressed by Medhatithi Kanwa (I.20.7) as the thrice seven ecstasies of the Beatitude, ratn¯ani trih. s¯apt¯ani, or more literally, the ecstasies in their three series of seven, each of which the Ribhus bring out in their separate and complete expression, ekam eka ˙m su´sastibhih..   things and the crooked in mortals. Thereafter indeed they awoke and saw utterly (by the sun’s separation of the straight from the crooked, the truth from the falsehood); then indeed they held in them the bliss that is enjoyed in heaven, ratna ˙m dh¯arayanta dyubhaktam. Let all the gods be in all our homes, let there be the truth for our thought, O Mitra, O Varuna”; vi´sve vi´sv¯asu dury¯asu dev¯a, mitra dhiye varun.a satyam astu. This is evidently the same idea as has been expressed in different language by Parashara Shaktya, the pervasion of the whole existence by the thought and impulse of the Truth and the working of all the godheads in that thought and impulsion to create in every part of our existence the bliss and the immortality.  The hymn closes thus: “


Sri Aurobindo: May I speak the word towards Agni shining pure, the priest of the offering greatest in sacriﬁce who brings to us the all; may he press out both the pure udder of the Cows of Light and the puriﬁed food of the plant of delight (the Soma) poured out everywhere. He is the inﬁnite being of all the lords of sacriﬁce (the gods) and the guest of all human beings; may Agni, accepting into himself the increasing manifestation of the gods, knower of the births, be a giver of happiness.”  In the second hymn of the fourth Mandala we get very clearly and suggestively the parallelism of the seven Rishis who are the divine Angirases and the human fathers. The passage is preceded by four verses, IV.2.11-14, which bring in the idea of the human seeking after the Truth and the Bliss. “May he the knower discern perfectly the Knowledge and the Ignorance, the wide levels and the crooked that shut in mortals; and, O God, for a bliss fruitful in offspring, lavish on us Diti and protect Aditi.”


Sri Aurobindo: This eleventh verse is very striking in its signiﬁcance. We have the opposition of the Knowledge and the Ignorance familiar to Vedanta; and the Knowledge is likened to the wide open levels which are frequently referred to in the Veda; they are the large levels to which those ascend who labour in the sacriﬁce and they ﬁnd there Agni seated self-blissful (V.7.5); they are the wide being which he makes for his own body (V.4.6), the level wideness, the unobstructed vast. It is therefore the inﬁnite being of the Deva to which we arrive on the plane of the Truth, and it contains  The Victory of the Fathers  the thrice seven supreme seats of Aditi the Mother, the three supreme births of Agni within the Inﬁnite, anante antah. (IV.1.7) .


Sri Aurobindo: The Ignorance on the other hand is identiﬁed with the crooked or uneven levels4 which shut in mortals and it is therefore the limited, divided mortal existence. Moreover it is evident that the Ignorance is the Diti of the next half-verse, diti ˙m ca r¯asva aditim urus.ya, and the Knowledge is Aditi. Diti, called also Danu, means division and the obstructing powers or Vritras are her children, D¯anus, D¯anavas, Daityas, while Aditi is existence in its inﬁnity and the mother of the gods.


Sri Aurobindo: The Rishi desires a bliss fruitful in offspring, that is in divine works and their results and  this is to be effected through the conquest of all the riches held in itself by our divided mortal being but kept from us by the Vritras and Panis and through the holding of them in the inﬁnite divine being. The latter is to be in us protected from the ordinary tendency of our human existence, from subjection to the sons of Danu or Diti. The idea is evidently identical with that of the Isha Upanishad which declares the possession of the Knowledge and the Ignorance, the unity and the multiplicity in the one Brahman as the condition for the attainment of Immortality.  We then come to the seven divine seers.


Sri Aurobindo: “The seers unconquered declared the Seer (the Deva, Agni) holding him within in the homes of the human being; thence (from this embodied human being) mayst thou, O Agni, aspiring by the work (aryah.), behold by thy advancing movements these of whom thou must have the vision, the transcendent ones (the godheads of the Deva)”; kavi ˙m ´sa´s¯asuh. kavayo adabdh¯a, nidh¯arayanto dury¯asu ¯ayoh.; atas tva ˙m dr.´sy¯an agna et¯an, pad.bhih. pa´syer adbhut¯an arya evaih.. This is again the journey to the vision of the Godhead.


Sri Aurobindo: “Thou, O Agni, youngest power, art the perfect guide (on that journey) to him who sings the word and offers the Soma and orders the sacriﬁce; bring to the illumined who accomplishes the 4 Cittim acitti ˙m cinavad vi vidv¯an, pr.s.t.heva v¯ıt¯a vr.jin¯a ca mart¯an. Vr.jina means crooked, and is used in the Veda to indicate the crookedness of the falsehood as opposed to the open straightness of the Truth, but the poet has evidently in his mind the verbal sense of vr.j, to separate, screen off, and it is this verbal sense in the adjective that governs mart¯an.    work the bliss with its vast delight for his increasing, satisfying the doer of the work (or, the man, cars.an.ipr¯ah.). Now, O Agni, of all that we have done with our hands and our feet and our bodies the right thinkers (the Angirases) make as it were thy chariot by the work of the two arms (Heaven and Earth, bhurijoh.); seeking to possess the Truth they have worked their way to it (or won control of it),” r.ta ˙m yemuh. sudhya ¯a´sus. ¯an. ¯ah..


Sri Aurobindo: “Now as the seven seers of Dawn the Mother, the supreme disposers (of the sacriﬁce), may we beget for ourselves the gods; may we become the Angirases, sons of Heaven, breaking open the wealth-ﬁlled hill, shining in purity.” We have here very clearly the seven divine Seers as the supreme ordainers of the world-sacriﬁce and the idea of the human being “becoming” these seven Seers, that is to say, creating them in himself and growing into that which they mean, just as he becomes the Heaven and Earth and the other gods or, as it is otherwise put, begets or creates or forms (jan, kr., tan) the divine births in his own being.  Next the example of the human fathers is given as the original type of this great becoming and achievement. “Now also, even as our supreme ancient fathers, O Agni, seeking to possess the Truth, expressing the Word, travelled to the purity and the light; breaking open the earth (the material being) they uncovered the ruddy ones (the Dawns, the Cows); perfected in works and in light, seeking the godheads, gods, forging the Births like iron (or, forging the divine births like iron), making Agni a pure ﬂame, increasing Indra, they attained and reached the wideness of the Light (of the Cows, gavyam ¯urvam). As if herds of the Cow in the ﬁeld of riches, that was manifested to vision which is the Births of the Gods within, O puissant One; they both accomplished the wide enjoyments (or, longings) of mortals and worked as aspirers for the increase of the higher being”; ¯a y¯utheva ks.umati pa´svo akhyad, dev¯an¯a ˙m yaj janim¯a anti ugra; mart¯an¯a ˙m cid urva´s¯ır akr.pran, vr.dhe cid arya uparasya ¯ayoh..


Sri Aurobindo: Evidently, this is a repetition in other language of the double idea of possessing the riches of Diti, yet safeguarding Aditi. “We have done the work for thee, we have become perfect in works, the wide-shining Dawns have taken up their home in the Truth  The Victory of the Fathers  (or, have robed themselves with the Truth), in the fullness of Agni and his manifold delight, in the shining eye of the god in all his brightness.”  The Angirases are again mentioned in IV.3.11, and some of the expressions which lead up to this verse, are worth noting; for it cannot be too often repeated that no verse in the Veda can be properly understood except by reference to its context, to its place in the thought of the Sukta, to all that precedes and all that follows. The hymn opens with a call to men to create Agni who sacriﬁces in the truth, to create him in his form of golden light (hiran.yar¯upam, the gold being always the symbol of the solar light of the Truth, r.ta ˙m jyotih.) before the Ignorance can form itself,


Sri Aurobindo: pur¯a tanayitnor acitt¯at. The god is asked to awaken to the work of man and the truth in him as being himself “the Truth-conscious who places aright the thought”, r.tasya bodhi r.tacit sv¯adh¯ıh., — for all falsehood is merely a wrong placing of the Truth. He is to refer all fault and sin and defect in man to the various godheads or divine powers of the Divine Being so that it may be removed and the man declared ﬁnally blameless before the Inﬁnite Mother — aditaye an¯agasah., or for the inﬁnite existence, as it is elsewhere expressed.  Then in the ninth and tenth verses we have, expressed in various formulas, the idea of the united human and divine existence, Diti and Aditi, the latter founding, controlling and ﬂooding with itself the former. “The Truth controlled by the Truth I desire (i.e. the human by the divine), together the unripe things of the Cow and her ripe and honeyed yield (again the imperfect human and the perfect and blissful divine fruits of the universal consciousness and existence); she (the cow) being black (the dark and divided existence, Diti) is nourished by the shining water of the foundation, the water of the companion streams (j¯amaryen.a payas¯a). By the Truth Agni the Bull, the Male, sprinkled with the water of its levels, ranges unquivering, establishing wideness (wide space or manifestation); the dappled Bull milks the pure shining teat.”


Sri Aurobindo: The symbolic opposition between the shining white purity of the One who is the source, seat, foundation and the variegated colouring of the Life manifested   in the triple world is frequent in the Veda; this image of the dappled Bull and the pure-bright udder or source of the waters only repeats therefore, like the other images, the idea of the multiple manifestations of the human life puriﬁed, tranquillised in its activities, fed by the waters of the Truth and the Inﬁnity.  Finally the Rishi proceeds to the coupling, which we so repeatedly ﬁnd, of the luminous Cows and the Waters. “By the Truth the Angirases broke open and hurled asunder the hill and came to union with the Cows; human souls, they took up their dwelling in the blissful Dawn, Swar became manifest when Agni was born. By Truth the divine immortal waters, unoppressed, with their honeyed ﬂoods, O Agni, like a horse breasting forward in its gallopings ran in an eternal ﬂowing.” These four verses in fact are meant to give the preliminary conditions for the great achievement of the Immortality.


Sri Aurobindo: They are the symbols of the grand Mythus, the mythus of the Mystics in which they hid their supreme spiritual experience from the profane and, alas! effectively enough from their posterity. That they were secret symbols, images meant to reveal the truth which they protected but only to the initiated, to the knower, to the seer, Vamadeva himself tells us in the most plain and emphatic language in the last verse of this very hymn; “All these are secret words that I have uttered to thee who knowest, O Agni, O Disposer, words of leading, words of seer-knowledge that express their meaning to the seer, — I have spoken them illumined in my words and my thinkings”; et¯a vi´sv¯a vidus.e tubhya ˙m vedho, n¯ıth¯ani agne nin.y¯a vac¯a ˙msi; nivacan¯a kavaye k¯avy¯ani, a´sa ˙msis.a ˙m matibhir vipra ukthaih.. Secret words that have kept indeed their secret ignored by the priest, the ritualist, the grammarian, the pandit, the historian, the mythologist, to whom they have been words of darkness or seals of confusion and not what they were to the supreme ancient forefathers and their illumined posterity, nin.y¯a vac¯a ˙msi n¯ıth¯ani nivacan¯a k¯avy¯ani.   Chapter XX The Hound of Heaven  T HERE yet remain two constant features of the Angiras legend with regard to which we have to acquire a little farther light in order to master entirely this Vedic conception of the Truth and the discovery of the illuminations of the Dawn by the primeval Fathers; we have to ﬁx the identity of Sarama and the exact function of the Panis, two problems of Vedic interpretation which are very closely related to each other.


Sri Aurobindo: That Sarama is some power of the Light and probably of the Dawn is very clear; for once we know that the struggle between Indra and the original Aryan seers on the one hand and the sons of the Cave on the other is no strange deformation of primitive Indian history but a symbolic struggle between the powers of Light and Darkness, Sarama who leads in the search for the radiant herds and discovers both the path and the secret hold in the mountain must be a forerunner of the dawn of Truth in the human mind. And if we ask ourselves what power among the truth-ﬁnding faculties it is that thus discovers out of the darkness of the unknown in our being the truth that is hidden in it, we at once think of the intuition. For Sarama is not Saraswati, she is not the inspiration, even though the names are similar. Saraswati gives the full ﬂood of the knowledge; she is or awakens the great stream, maho arn.ah., and illumines with plenitude all the thoughts, dhiyo vi´sv¯a vi r¯ajati. Saraswati possesses and is the ﬂood of the Truth; Sarama is the traveller and seeker on its path who does not herself possess but rather ﬁnds that which is lost.


Sri Aurobindo: Neither is she the plenary word of the revelation, the Teacher of man like the goddess Ila; for even when what she seeks is found, she does not take possession but only gives the message to the seers and their divine helpers who have still to ﬁght for the possession of the light that has been discovered.   Let us see, however, what the Veda itself says of Sarama.    There is a verse, I.104.5, which does not mention her name, nor is the hymn itself about the Angirases or Panis, yet the line describes accurately enough the part attributed to her in the Veda: — “When this guide became visible, she went, knowing, towards the seat that is as if the home of the Dasyu,” prati yat sy¯a n¯ıth¯a adar´si dasyor, oko na acch¯a sadana ˙m j¯anat¯ı g¯at. These are the two essential characteristics of Sarama; the knowledge comes to her beforehand, before vision, springs up instinctively at the least indication and with that knowledge she guides the rest of the faculties and divine powers that seek.


Sri Aurobindo: And she leads to that seat, sadanam, the home of the Destroyers, which is at the other pole of existence to the seat of the Truth, sadanam r.tasya, in the cave or secret place of darkness, guh¯ay¯am, just as the home of the gods is in the cave or secrecy of light. In other words, she is a power descended from the superconscient Truth which leads us to the light that is hidden in ourselves, in the subconscient. All these characteristics apply exactly to the intuition.  Sarama is mentioned by name only in a few hymns of the Veda, and invariably in connection with the achievement of the Angirases or the winning of the highest planes of existence. The most important of these hymns is the Sukta of the Atris we have already had to take note of in our scrutiny of the Navagwa and Dashagwa Angirases, V.45.


Sri Aurobindo: The ﬁrst three verses summarise the great achievement. “Severing the hill of heaven by the words he found them, yea, the radiant ones of the arriving Dawn went abroad; he uncovered those that were in the pen, Swar rose up; a god opened the human doors. The Sun attained widely to strength and glory; the Mother of the Cows (the Dawn), knowing, came from the wideness; the rivers became rushing ﬂoods, ﬂoods that cleft (their channel), heaven was made ﬁrm like a well-shaped pillar. To this word the contents of the pregnant hill (came forth) for the supreme birth of the Great Ones (the rivers or, less probably, the dawns); the hill parted asunder, heaven was perfected (or, accomplished itself); they lodged (upon earth) and distributed the largeness.” It is of Indra and the Angirases that the Rishi is speaking, as the rest of the hymn shows and  The Hound of Heaven  as is indeed evident from the expressions used; for these are the usual formulas of the Angiras mythus and repeat the exact expressions that are constantly used in the hymns of the delivery of the Dawn, the Cows and the Sun.


Sri Aurobindo: We know already what they mean. The hill of our already formed triple existence which rises into heaven at its summit is rent asunder by Indra and the hidden illuminations go abroad ; Swar, the higher heaven of the superconscient, is manifested by the upward streaming of the brilliant herds. The sun of Truth diffuses all the strength and glory of its light, the inner Dawn comes from the luminous wideness instinct with knowledge, — j¯anat¯ı g¯at, the same phrase that is used of her who leads to the house of the Dasyu in I.104.5; and of Sarama in III.31.6, — the rivers of the Truth, representing the outﬂow of its being and its movement (r.tasya pres. ¯a), descend in their rushing streams and make a channel here for their waters; heaven, the mental being, is perfected and made ﬁrm like a well-shaped pillar to support the vast Truth of the higher or immortal life that is now made manifest and the largeness of that Truth is lodged here in all the physical being. The delivery of the pregnant contents of the hill, parvatasya garbhah., the illuminations constituting the seven-headed thought, r.tasya dh¯ıtih., which come forth in answer to the inspired word, leads to the supreme birth of the seven great rivers who constitute the substance of the Truth put into active movement, r.tasya pres. ¯a.


Sri Aurobindo: Then after the invocation of Indra and Agni by the “words of perfect speech that are loved of the gods”, — for by those words the Maruts1 perform the sacriﬁces as seers who by their seer-knowledge do well the sacriﬁcial work, ukthebhir hi s.m¯a kavayah. suyaj˜n¯a . . . maruto yajanti, — the Rishi next puts into the mouth of men an exhortation and mutual encouragement to do even as the Fathers and attain the same divine results.   “Come now, today let us become perfected in thought, let us destroy suffering and unease, let us embrace the higher good,” eto nu adya sudhyo bhav¯ama, pra ducchun¯a minav¯ama ¯a var¯ıyah.;  “far from us let us put always all hostile things (all the things 1 The thought-attaining powers of the Life as will appear hereafter.


Sri Aurobindo: that attack and divide, dves. ¯a ˙msi); let us go forward towards the Master of the sacriﬁce. Come, let us create the Thought, O friends, (obviously, the seven-headed Angiras-thought), which is the Mother (Aditi or the Dawn) and removes the screening pen of the Cow.” The signiﬁcance is clear enough; it is in such passages as these that the inner sense of the Veda half disengages itself from the veil of the symbol.


Sri Aurobindo: Then the Rishi speaks of the great and ancient example which men are called upon to repeat, the example of the Angirases, the achievement of Sarama. “Here the stone was set in motion whereby the Navagwas chanted the hymn for the ten months, Sarama going to the Truth found the cows, the Angiras made all things true. When in the dawning of this vast One (Usha representing the inﬁnite Aditi, m¯at¯a dev¯an¯am aditer an¯ıkam) all the Angirases came together with the cows (or rather, perhaps by the illuminations represented in the symbol of the cows or Rays); there was the fountain of these (illuminations) in the supreme world; by the path of the Truth Sarama found the cows.” Here we see that it is through the movement of Sarama going straight to the Truth by the path of the Truth, that the seven seers, representing the seven-headed or seven-rayed thought of Ayasya and Brihaspati, ﬁnd all the concealed illuminations and by force of these illuminations they all come together, as we have been already told by Vasishtha, in the level wideness, sam¯ane ¯urve, from which the Dawn has descended with the knowledge (¯urv¯ad j¯anat¯ı g¯at, v. 2) or, as it is here expressed, in the dawning of this vast One, that is to say, in the inﬁnite consciousness. There, as Vasishtha has said, they, united, agree in knowledge and do not strive together, sa˙ngat¯asah.


Sri Aurobindo: sa ˙m j¯anate na yatante mithas te, that is to say, the seven become as one, as is indicated in another hymn; they become the one seven-mouthed Angiras, an image corresponding to that of the seven-headed thought, and it is this single uniﬁed Angiras who makes all things true as the result of Sarama’s discovery (verse 7). The harmonised, united, perfected Seer-Will corrects all falsehood and crookedness and turns all thought, life, action into terms of the Truth. In this hymn also the action of Sarama is precisely that of the Intuition  The Hound of Heaven  which goes straight to the Truth by the straight path of the Truth and not through the crooked paths of doubt and error and which delivers the Truth out of the veil of darkness and false appearances; it is through the illuminations discovered by her that the Seer-mind can attain to the complete revelation of the Truth. The rest of the hymn speaks of the rising of the sevenhorsed Sun towards his “ﬁeld which spreads wide for him at the end of the long journey”, the attainment of the swift Bird to the Soma and of the young Seer to that ﬁeld of the luminous cows, the Sun’s ascent to the “luminous Ocean”, its crossing over it “like a ship guided by the thinkers” and the descent upon man of the waters of that ocean in response to their call. In those waters the sevenfold thought of the Angiras is established by the human seer.


Sri Aurobindo: If we remember that the Sun represents the light of the superconscient or truth-conscious knowledge and the luminous ocean the realms of the superconscient with their thrice seven seats of the Mother Aditi, the sense of these symbolic expressions2 will not be difﬁcult to understand. It is the highest attainment of the supreme goal which follows upon the complete achievement of the Angirases, their united ascent to the plane of the Truth, just as that achievement follows upon the discovery of the herds by Sarama.  Another hymn of great importance in this connection is the thirty-ﬁrst of the third Mandala, by Vishwamitra. “Agni (the Divine Force) is born quivering with his ﬂame of the offering for sacriﬁce to the great Sons of the Shining One (the Deva, Rudra); great is the child of them, a vast birth; there is a great movement of the Driver of the shining steeds (Indra, the Divine Mind) by the sacriﬁces. The conquering (dawns) cleave to him in his struggle, they deliver by knowledge a great light out of the darkness; knowing the Dawns rise up to him, Indra has become the one lord of the luminous cows.


Sri Aurobindo: The cows who were in the strong place (of the Panis) the thinkers clove out; by the mind the 2 It is in this sense that we can easily understand many now obscure expressions of the Veda, e.g. VIII.68.9, “May we conquer by thy aid in our battles the great wealth in the waters and the Sun,” apsu s¯urye mahad dhanam.    seven seers set them moving forward (or upwards towards the supreme), they found the entire path (goal or ﬁeld of travel) of the Truth; knowing those (supreme seats of the Truth) Indra by the obeisance entered into them,” v¯ıl.au sat¯ır abhi dh¯ır¯a atr.ndan, pr¯ac¯a ahinvan manas¯a sapta vipr¯ah.; vi´sv¯am avindan pathy¯am r.tasya, praj¯anann it t¯a namas¯a vive´sa. This is, as usual, the great birth, the great light, the great divine movement of the Truthknowledge with the ﬁnding of the goal and the entry of the gods and the seers into the supreme planes above. Next we have the part of Sarama in this work.


Sri Aurobindo: “When Sarama found the broken place of the hill, he (or perhaps she, Sarama) made continuous the great and supreme goal. She, the fair-footed, led him to the front of the imperishable ones (the unslayable cows of the Dawn); ﬁrst she went, knowing, towards their cry.” It is again the Intuition that leads; knowing, she speeds at once and in front of all towards the voice of the concealed illuminations, towards the place where the hill so ﬁrmly formed and impervious in appearance (v¯ıl.u, dr.d.ha) is broken and can admit the seekers.  The rest of the hymn continues to describe the achievement of the Angirases and Indra. “He went, the greatest seer of them all, doing them friendship; the pregnant hill sent forth its contents for the doer of perfect works; in the strength of manhood he with the young (Angirases) seeking plenitude of riches attained possession, then singing the hymn of light he became at once the Angiras.


Sri Aurobindo: Becoming in our front the form and measure of each existing thing, he knows all the births, he slays Shushna”; that is to say, the Divine Mind assumes a form answering to each existing thing in the world and reveals its true divine image and meaning and slays the false force that distorts knowledge and action. “Seeker of the cows, traveller to the seat of heaven, singing the hymns, he, the Friend, delivers his friends out of all defect (of right self-expression). With a mind that sought the Light (the cows) they entered their seats by the illumining words, making the path towards Immortality (ni gavyat¯a manas¯a sedur arkaih. kr.n.v¯an¯aso amr.tatv¯aya g¯atum). This is that large seat of theirs, the Truth by which they took possession of the months (the ten months of the Dashagwas). Harmonised in vision (or,  The Hound of Heaven  perfectly seeing) they rejoiced in their own (abode, Swar) milking out the milk of the ancient seed (of things).


Sri Aurobindo: Their cry (of the Word) heated all the earth and heaven (created, that is to say, the burning clarity, gharma, tapta ˙m ghr.tam, which is the yield of the solar cows); they established in that which was born a ﬁrm abiding and in the cows the heroes (that is, the battling force was established in the light of the knowledge).  “Indra, the Vritra-slayer, by those who were born (the sons of the sacriﬁce), by the offerings, by the hymns of illumination released upward the shining ones; the wide and delightful Cow (the cow Aditi, the vast and blissful higher consciousness) bringing for him the sweet food, the honey mixed with the ghr.ta, yielded it as her milk. For this Father also (for Heaven) they fashioned the vast and shining abode; doers of perfect works, they had the entire vision of it. Wide-upholding by their support the Parents (Heaven and Earth) they sat in that high world and embraced all its ecstasy. When for the cleaving away (of evil and falsehood) the vast Thought holds him immediately increasing in his pervasion of earth and heaven, — then for Indra in whom are the equal and faultless words, there are all irresistible energies.


Sri Aurobindo: He has found the great, manifold and blissful Field (the wide ﬁeld of the cows, Swar); and he has sent forth together all the moving herd for his friends. Indra shining out by the human souls (the Angirases) has brought into being, together, the Sun, the Dawn, the Path and the Flame.”  And in the remaining verses the same ﬁgures continue, with an intervention of the famous image of the rain which has been so much misunderstood. “The Ancient-born I make new that I may conquer. Do thou remove our many undivine hurters and set Swar for our possessing.


Sri Aurobindo: The purifying rains are extended before us (in the shape of the waters); take us over to the state of bliss that is the other shore of them. Warring in thy chariot protect us from the foe; soon, soon make us conquerors of the Cows.  The Vritra-slayer, the Master of the Cows, showed (to men) the cows; he has entered with his shining laws (or lustres) within those who are black (void of light, like the Panis); showing the truths (the cows of truth) by the Truth he has opened all his   own doors,” pra s¯unr.t¯a di´sam¯ana r.tena dura´s ca vi´sv¯a avr.n.od apa sv¯ah.; that is to say, he opens the doors of his own world, Swar, after breaking open by his entry into our darkness (antah. kr.s.n. ¯an g¯at) the “human doors” kept closed by the Panis.  Such is this remarkable hymn, the bulk of which I have translated because it both brings into striking relief the mystic and entirely psychological character of the Vedic poetry and by so doing sets out vividly the nature of the imagery in the midst of which Sarama ﬁgures.


Sri Aurobindo: The other references to Sarama in the Rig Veda do not add anything essential to the conception. We have a brief allusion in IV.16.8, “When thou didst tear the waters out of the hill, Sarama became manifest before thee; so do thou as our leader tear out much wealth for us, breaking the pens, hymned by the Angirases.” It is the Intuition manifesting before the Divine Mind as its forerunner when there is the emergence of the waters, the streaming movements of the Truth that break out of the hill in which they were conﬁned by Vritra (verse 7); and it is by means of the Intuition that this godhead becomes our leader to the rescue of the Light and the conquest of the much wealth hidden within in the rock behind the fortress gates of the Panis.  We ﬁnd another allusion to Sarama in a hymn by Parashara Shaktya, I.72. This is one of the Suktas which most clearly reveal the sense of the Vedic imagery, like most indeed of the hymns of Parashara, a very luminous poet who loves always to throw back something more than a corner of the mystic’s veil.


Sri Aurobindo: It is brief and I shall translate it in full. “He has created, within, the seer-knowings of the eternal Disposer of things, holding in his hand many powers (powers of the divine Purushas, nary¯a pur¯un.i); Agni creating together all immortalities becomes the master of the (divine) riches. All the immortals, they who are not limited (by ignorance), desiring, found him in us as if the Calf (of the cow Aditi) existing everywhere; labouring, travelling to the Seat, holding the Thought they attained in the supreme seat to the shining (glory) of Agni. O Agni, when through the three years (three symbolic seasons or periods corresponding perhaps to the passage through the three mental heavens) they,  The Hound of Heaven  pure, had served thee, the pure one, with the ghr.ta, they held the sacriﬁcial names and set moving (to the supreme heaven) forms well born. They had knowledge of the vast heaven and earth and bore them forward, they the sons of Rudra, the lords of the sacriﬁce; the mortal awoke to vision and found Agni standing in the seat supreme.


Sri Aurobindo: Knowing perfectly (or in harmony) they kneeled down to him; they with their wives (the female energies of the gods) bowed down to him who is worthy of obeisance; purifying themselves (or, perhaps, exceeding the limits of heaven and earth) they created their own (their proper or divine) forms, guarded in the gaze, each friend, of the Friend. In thee the gods of the sacriﬁce found the thrice seven secret seats hidden within; they, being of one heart, protect by them the immortality. Guard thou the herds that stand and that which moves. O Agni, having knowledge of all manifestations (or births) in the worlds (or, knowing all the knowledge of the peoples) establish thy forces, continuous, for life. Knowing, within, the paths of the journeying of the gods thou becamest their sleepless messenger and the bearer of the offerings.


Sri Aurobindo: The seven mighty ones of heaven (the rivers) placing aright the thought, knowing the Truth, discerned the doors of the felicity; Sarama found the fastness, the wideness of the cows whereby now the human creature enjoys (the supreme riches). They who entered upon all things that bear right issue, made the path to Immortality; by the great ones and by the greatness earth stood wide; the mother Aditi with her sons came for the upholding. The Immortals planted in him the shining glory, when they made the two eyes of heaven (identical probably with the two vision-powers of the Sun, the two horses of Indra); rivers, as it were, ﬂow down released; the shining ones (the cows) who were here below knew, O Agni.”  So runs this hymn of Parashara, translated with the utmost possible literalness even at the cost of some uncouthness in the English. It is clear at the very ﬁrst glance that it is throughout a hymn of knowledge, of the Truth, of a divine Flame which is hardly distinguishable from the supreme Deity, of immortality, of the ascent of the gods, the divine powers, by the sacriﬁce to their godhead, to their supreme names, to their proper forms, to   the shining glory of the supreme state with its thrice seven seats of the Godhead.


Sri Aurobindo: Such an ascent can have no other meaning than the ascent of the divine powers in man out of their ordinary cosmic appearances to the shining Truth beyond, as indeed Parashara himself tells us that by this action of the gods mortal man awakens to the knowledge and ﬁnds Agni standing in the supreme seat and goal; vidan marto nemadhit¯a cikitv¯an, agni ˙m pade parame tasthiv¯a ˙msam. What is Sarama doing in such a hymn if she is not a power of the Truth, if her cows are not the rays of a divine dawn of illumination? What have the cows of old warring tribes and the sanguinary squabbles of our Aryan and Dravidian ancestors over their mutual plunderings and cattleliftings to do with this luminous apocalypse of the immortality and the godhead? Or what are these rivers that think and know the Truth and discover the hidden doors? Or must we still say that these were the rivers of the Punjab dammed up by drought or by the Dravidians and Sarama a mythological ﬁgure for an Aryan embassy or else only the physical Dawn?


Sri Aurobindo: One hymn in the tenth Mandala is devoted entirely to this “embassy” of Sarama, it is the colloquy of Sarama and the Panis; but it adds nothing essential to what we already know about her and its chief importance lies in the help it gives us in forming our conception of the masters of the cavern treasure. We may note, however, that neither in this hymn, nor in the others we have noticed is there the least indication of the ﬁgure of the divine hound which was attributed to Sarama in a possibly later development of the Vedic imagery. It is surely the shining fairfooted goddess by whom the Panis are attracted and whom they desire as their sister, — not as a dog to guard their cattle, but as one who will share in the possession of their riches. The image of the hound of heaven is, however, exceedingly apt and striking and was bound to develop out of the legend. In one of the earlier hymns we have mention indeed of a son for whom Sarama “got food” according to an ancient interpretation which accounts for the phrase by a story that the hound Sarama demanded food for her offspring in the sacriﬁce as a condition of her search for the lost cows.


Sri Aurobindo: But this is obviously an explanatory invention  The Hound of Heaven  which ﬁnds no place in the Rig Veda itself. The Veda says, “In the sacriﬁce” or, as it more probably means, “in the seeking of Indra and the Angirases (for the cows) Sarama discovered a foundation for the Son,” vidat saram¯a tanay¯aya dh¯asim (I.62.3); for such is the more likely sense here of the word dh¯asim. The son is in all probability the son born of the sacriﬁce, a constant element in the Vedic imagery and not the dog-race born of Sarama.  We have similar phrases in the Veda as in I.96.4, m¯atari´sv¯a puruv¯arapus.t.ir vidad g¯atu ˙m tanay¯aya svarvit, “Matarishwan (the Life-god, Vayu) increasing the many desirable things (the higher objects of life) discovered the path for the Son, discovered Swar,” where the subject is evidently the same but the son has nothing to do with any brood of puppies.  The two Sarameya dogs, messengers of Yama, are mentioned in a late hymn in the tenth Mandala, but without any reference to Sarama as their mother.


Sri Aurobindo: This occurs in the famous “funeral” hymn X.14, and it is worth while noting the real character of Yama and his two dogs in the Rig Veda. In the later ideas Yama is the god of Death and has his own special world; but in the Rig Veda he seems to have been originally a form of the Sun, — even as late as the Isha Upanishad we ﬁnd the name used as an appellation of the Sun, — and then one of the twin children of the wide-shining Lord of Truth. He is the guardian of the dharma, the law of the Truth, satyadharma, which is a condition of immortality, and therefore himself the guardian of immortality. His world is Swar, the world of immortality, amr.te loke aks.ite, where, as we are told in IX.113, is the indestructible Light, where Swar is established, yatra jyotir ajasra ˙m, yasmin loke svar hitam. The hymn X.14 is indeed not a hymn of Death so much as a hymn of Life and Immortality.


Sri Aurobindo: Yama and the ancient Fathers have discovered the path to that world which is a pasture of the Cows whence the enemy cannot bear away the radiant herds, yamo no g¯atu ˙m prathamo viveda, nais. ¯a gavy¯utir apabhartav¯a u, yatr¯a nah. p¯urve pitarah. pareyuh..


Sri Aurobindo: The soul of the heaven-ascending mortal is bidden to “outrun the two four-eyed varicoloured Sarameya dogs on the good (or effective) path.” Of that path to heaven they are the four-eyed   guardians, protecting man on the road by their divine vision, yau te ´sv¯anau yama raks.it¯arau caturaks.au pathiraks.¯ı nr.caks.asau, and Yama is asked to give them as an escort to the soul on its way. These dogs are “wide-moving, not easily satisﬁed” and range as the messengers of the Lord of the Law among men.  And the hymn prays, “May they (the dogs) give us back bliss here in the unhappy (world) so that we may look upon the Sun.”  We are still in the order of the old Vedic ideas, the Light and the Bliss and the Immortality, and these Sarameya dogs have the essential characteristics of Sarama, the vision, the wide-ranging movement, the power to travel on the path by which the goal is reached.


Sri Aurobindo: Sarama leads to the wideness of the cows; these dogs protect the soul on its journey to the inviolable pasture, the ﬁeld (ks.etra) of the luminous and imperishable herds. Sarama brings us to the truth, to the sun-vision which is the way to the bliss; these dogs bring the weal to man in this world of suffering so that he shall have the vision of the Sun. Whether Sarama ﬁgures as the fair-footed goddess speeding on the path or the heavenly hound, mother of these wide-ranging guardians of the path, the idea is the same, a power of the Truth that seeks and discovers, that ﬁnds by a divine faculty of insight the hidden Light and the denied Immortality. But it is to this seeking and ﬁnding that her function is limited.   Chapter XXI The Sons of Darkness


Sri Aurobindo: W  E HAVE seen, not once but repeatedly, that it is impossible to read into the story of the Angirases, Indra and Sarama, the cave of the Panis and the conquest of the Dawn, the Sun and the Cows an account of a political and military struggle between Aryan invaders and Dravidian cavedwellers. It is a struggle between the seekers of Light and the powers of Darkness; the cows are the illuminations of the Sun and the Dawn, they cannot be physical cows; the wide fearfree ﬁeld of the Cows won by Indra for the Aryans is the wide world of Swar, the world of the solar Illumination, the threefold luminous regions of Heaven. Therefore equally the Panis must be taken as powers of the cave of Darkness. It is quite true that the Panis are Dasyus or D¯asas; they are spoken of constantly by that name, they are described as the D¯asa Varna as opposed to the Arya Varna, and varn.a, colour, is the word used for caste or class in the Brahmanas and later writings, although it does not therefore follow that it has that sense in the Rig Veda.


Sri Aurobindo: The Dasyus are the haters of the sacred word; they are those who give not to the gods the gift or the holy wine, who keep their wealth of cows and horses and other treasure for themselves and do not give them to the seers; they are those who do not the sacriﬁce.  We may, if we like, suppose that there was a struggle between two different cults in India and that the Rishis took their images from the physical struggle between the human representatives of these cults and applied them to the spiritual conﬂict, just as they employed the other details of their physical life to symbolise the spiritual sacriﬁce, the spiritual wealth, the spiritual battle and journey. But it is perfectly certain that in the Rig Veda at least it is the spiritual conﬂict and victory, not the physical battle and plunder of which they are speaking.  It is either an uncritical or a disingenuous method to take   isolated passages and give them a particular sense which will do well enough there only while ignoring the numerous other passages in which that sense is patently inapplicable. We must take as a whole all the references in the Veda to the Panis, their wealth, their characteristics, the victory of the Gods, the seers and the Aryans over them and adopt uniformly that conclusion which arises from all the passages thus taken together.


Sri Aurobindo: When we follow this method we ﬁnd that in many of these passages the idea of the Panis as human beings is absolutely impossible and that they are powers either of physical or of spiritual darkness; in others that they cannot at all be powers of physical darkness, but may well be either human enemies of the god-seekers and sacriﬁcers or else enemies of the spiritual Light; in yet others that they cannot be either human enemies or enemies of the physical Light, but are certainly the enemies of the spiritual Light, the Truth and the Thought. From these data there can be only one conclusion, that they are always and only enemies of the spiritual Light.  We may take as the master-clue to the general character of these Dasyus the Rik V.14.4, “Agni born shone out slaying the Dasyus, the darkness by the Light; he found the Cows, the Waters, Swar,” agnir j¯ato arocata, ghnan dasy¯un jyotis. ¯a tamah.; avindad g¯a apah. svah..


Sri Aurobindo: There are two great divisions of the Dasyus, the Panis who intercept both the cows and the waters but are especially associated with the refusal of the cows, the Vritras who intercept the waters and the light, but are especially associated with the withholding of the waters; all Dasyus without exception stand in the way of the ascent to Swar and oppose the acquisition of the wealth by the Aryan seers. The refusal of the light is their opposition to the vision of Swar, svardr.´s, and the vision of the sun, to the supreme vision of knowledge, upam¯a ketuh.; the refusal of the waters is their opposition to the abundant movement of Swar, svarvat¯ır apah., the movement or streamings of the Truth, r.tasya pres. ¯a, r.tasya dh¯ar¯ah.; the opposition to the wealth-acquisition is their refusal of the abundant substance of Swar, vasu, dhana, v¯aja, hiran.ya, that great wealth which is found in the sun and in the waters, apsu s¯urye mahad dhanam. Still since the whole struggle is between the Light and  The Sons of Darkness  the Darkness, the Truth and the Falsehood, the divine Maya and the undivine, all the Dasyus alike are here identiﬁed with the Darkness; and it is by the birth and shining of Agni that the Light is created with which he slays the Dasyus and the Darkness. The historical interpretation will not do at all here, though the naturalistic may pass if we isolate the passage and suppose the lighting of the sacriﬁcial ﬁre to be the cause of the daily sunrise; but we have to judge from a comparative study of the Veda and not on the strength of isolated passages.


Sri Aurobindo: The opposition between the Aryans and the Panis or Dasyus is brought out in another hymn of the ﬁfth Mandala and in III.34 we have the expression Arya Varna. We must remember that the Dasyus have been identiﬁed with the Darkness; therefore the Aryans must be connected with the Light and we actually ﬁnd that the light of the Sun is called in the Veda the Aryan Light in contradistinction evidently to the D¯asa darkness. Vasishtha also speaks of the three Aryan peoples who are jyotiragr¯ah., led by the light, having the light in their front (VII.33.7). The AryanDasyu question can only be adequately treated by an exhaustive discussion in which all the relevant passages are scrutinised and the difﬁculties faced, but for my present purpose this is a sufﬁcient starting-point. We must remember also that we have in the Veda the expressions r.ta ˙m jyotih., hiran.ya ˙m jyotih., the true light, the golden light, which give us an additional clue.


Sri Aurobindo: Now these three epithets of the solar light, ¯arya, r.ta, hiran.ya are, I suggest, mutually illuminative and almost equivalent. The Sun is the Lord of Truth, therefore its light is the r.ta ˙m jyotih.; this light of truth is that which the Aryan, god or mortal, possesses, and which constitutes his Arya-hood; again the epithet golden is constantly applied to the Sun and gold is in Veda probably the symbol of the substance of the truth, for its substance is the light which is the golden wealth found in Surya and in the waters of Swar, apsu s¯urye, — therefore we have the epithet hiran.ya ˙m jyotih.. This golden or shining light is the hue, varn.a, of the truth; it is also the hue of the thoughts full of that illumination won by the Aryan, the cows who are bright in colour, ´sukra, ´sveta, the colour of Light; while the Dasyu, being a power of darkness, is   black in hue. I suggest that the brightness of the light of the truth, jyotih. ¯aryam, is the Arya varn.a, the hue of these Aryans who are jyotiragr¯ah.; the darkness of the night of the ignorance is the hue of the Panis, the D¯asa varn.a.


Sri Aurobindo: In this way varn.a would come to mean almost the nature or else all those of that particular nature, the colour being the symbol of the nature; and that this idea was a current notion among the ancient Aryans seems to me to be shown by the later use of different colours to distinguish the four castes, white, red, yellow and black.  The passage in V.34 runs as follows. “He (Indra) desires not to ascend by the ﬁve and by the ten; he cleaves not to him who gives not the Soma even though he grow and increase; he overcomes him or else he slays in his impetuous movement; he gives to the god-seeker for his enjoyment the pen full of the Cows. Cleaver (of the foe) in the battle-shock, ﬁrm holder of the discus (or the wheel), averse from him who gives not the Soma but increaser of the Soma-giver, terrible is Indra and the tamer of all; Aryan, he brings into utter subjection the D¯asa.  He comes driving this enjoyment of the Pani, robbing him of it, and he apportions entirely to the giver for his enjoyment the wealth rich in hero-powers (lit. in men, s¯unara ˙m vasu, v¯ıra and nr. being often used synonymously); that man who makes wroth the strength of Indra is held back manifoldly in a difﬁcult journeying, (durge1 cana dhriyate ¯a puru).


Sri Aurobindo: When Maghavan has known in the shining cows the Two who are rich in wealth and have all forces, he growing in knowledge makes a third his helper and rushing impetuously looses upward the multitude of the cows (gavyam) by the help of his ﬁghters.” And the last Rik of the Sukta speaks of the Aryan (god or man) arriving at the highest knowledge-vision (upam¯a ˙m ketum aryah.), the waters in their meeting nourishing him and his housing a strong and brilliant force of battle, ks.atram amavat tves.am.  From what we already know of these symbols we can easily 1 The Rishis pray always to the gods to make their path to the highest bliss easy of going and thornless, suga; durga is the opposite of this easy going, it is the path beset by manifold (puru) dangers and sufferings and difﬁculties.   The Sons of Darkness


Sri Aurobindo: grasp the inner sense of the hymn. Indra, the Divine Mind-Power takes their secret wealth from the powers of the Ignorance with whom he refuses to ally himself even when they are rich and prosper; he gives the imprisoned herds of the illumined Dawn to the man of the sacriﬁce who desires the godheads. He is himself the Aryan who brings the life of the ignorance into complete subjection to the higher life so that it yields up to it all the wealth it holds. The use of the words ¯arya and arya to signify the gods, not only in this but in other passages, tends to show in itself that the opposition of Arya and Dasyu is not at all a national or tribal or merely human distinction, but has a deeper signiﬁcance. The ﬁghters are certainly the seven Angirases; for they and not the Maruts, which is Sayana’s interpretation of satvabhih., are Indra’s helpers in the release of the Cows.


Sri Aurobindo: But the three persons whom Indra ﬁnds or comes to know by entering among the bright cows, by possessing the trooping illuminations of the Thought, are more difﬁcult to ﬁx. In all probability it is these three by whom the seven rays of the Angiras-knowledge are raised to ten so that they pass successfully through the ten months and release the sun and the cows; for it is after ﬁnding or knowing the two and getting help of the third that Indra releases the cows of the Panis. They may also be connected with the symbolism of the three Aryan peoples led by the light and the three luminous worlds of Swar; for the attainment of the supreme knowledge-vision, upam¯a ketuh., is the ﬁnal result of their action and this supreme knowledge is that which has the vision of Swar and stands in its three luminous worlds, rocan¯ani, as we ﬁnd in III.2.14, svardr.´sa ˙m ketu ˙m divo rocanasth¯am us.arbudham, “the knowledge-vision that sees Swar, that stands in the shining worlds, that awakes in the dawn.”  In III.34 Vishwamitra gives us the expression ¯arya varn.a and at the same time the key to its psychological signiﬁcance. Three verses of the hymn (8-10) run as follows: “(They hymn) the supremely desirable, the ever overcoming, the giver of strength who wins possession of Swar and the divine waters; the thinkers have joy in the wake of Indra who takes possession of the earth and the heaven.


Sri Aurobindo: Indra wins possession of the Steeds, wins the   Sun, wins the Cow of the many enjoyments; he wins the golden enjoyment, having slain the Dasyus he fosters (or protects) the Aryan varn.a; Indra wins the herbs and the days, the trees and the mid-world; he pierces Vala and impels forward the speaker of the words; so he becomes the tamer of those who set against him their will in works, (abhikrat¯un¯am).” We have here the symbolic elements of all the wealth won by Indra for the Aryan, and it includes the Sun, the days, the earth, the heavens, the middle world, the horses, the growths of earth, herbs and trees (vanaspat¯ın in the double sense, lords of the forest and lords of enjoyment); and we have as against Vala and his Dasyus the Aryan varn.a.  But in the verses that precede (4-6) we have already the word varn.a as the hue of the Aryan thoughts, the thoughts that are true and full of light. “Indra, Swar-conquering, bringing to birth the days assailed and conquered by the desirers (the Angirases) these armies (of the Dasyus); he made to shine for man the knowledgevision of the days (ketum ahn¯am), he found the Light for the vast enjoyment; . . . he made conscious in knowledge these thoughts for his adorer, he carried forward (beyond the obstruction of the Dasyus) this bright varn.a of these (thoughts), acetayad dhiya im¯a jaritre, pra ima ˙m varn.am atirac chukram ¯as¯am.


Sri Aurobindo: They set in action (or, praise) many great and perfect works of the great Indra; by his strength he crushes, in his overwhelming energy, by his workings of knowledge (m¯ay¯abhih.) the crooked Dasyus.”  We ﬁnd here the Vedic phrase ketum ahn¯am, the knowledgevision of the days, by which is meant the light of the Sun of Truth that leads to the vast beatitude; for the “days” are those produced through Indra’s conquest of Swar for man following as we know upon his destruction of the Pani armies with the help of the Angirases and the ascent of the Sun and the shining Cows. It is for man and as powers of man that all this is done by the gods, not on their own account since they possess already; — for him that as the Nr., the divine Man or Purusha, Indra holds many strengths of that manhood, nr.vad . . . nary¯a pur¯un.i;  him he awakes to the knowledge of these thoughts which are symbolised as the shining cows released from the Panis; and the  The Sons of Darkness  shining hue of these thoughts, ´sukra ˙m varn.am ¯as¯am, is evidently the same as that ´sukra or ´sveta Aryan hue which is mentioned in verse 9.


Sri Aurobindo: Indra carries forward or increases the “colour” of these thoughts beyond the opposition of the Panis, pra varn.am atirac chukram; in doing so he slays the Dasyus and protects or fosters and increases the Aryan “colour”, hatv¯ı dasy¯un pra ¯arya ˙m varn.am ¯avat. Moreover these Dasyus are the crooked ones, vr.jin¯an, and are conquered by Indra’s works or forms of knowledge, his “m¯ay¯a”s by which, as we are elsewhere told, he overcomes the opposing “m¯ay¯a”s of the Dasyus, Vritra or Vala. The straight and the crooked are constantly synonymous in Veda with the truth and the falsehood. Therefore it is clear that these Pani Dasyus are crooked powers of the falsehood and ignorance who set their false knowledge, their false strength, will and works against the true knowledge, the true strength, will and works of the gods and the Aryans. The triumph of the Light is the triumph of the divine knowledge of the Truth against the darkness of this false or demoniac knowledge; that victory is the ascent of the Sun, the birth of the Days, the advent of the Dawn, the release of the herds of the shining Rays and their mounting to the world of Light.


Sri Aurobindo: That the cows are the thoughts of the Truth we are told clearly enough in IX.111, a hymn to Soma. “By this brilliant light he, purifying himself, breaks through all hostile powers by his self-yoked horses, as if by the self-yoked horses of the Sun.  He shines, a stream of the outpressed Soma, purifying himself, luminous, the brilliant One, when he encompasses all forms (of things) with the speakers of the Rik, with the seven-mouthed speakers of the Rik (the Angiras powers). Thou, O Soma ﬁndest that wealth of the Panis; thou by the Mothers (the cows of the Panis, frequently so designed in other hymns) makest thyself bright in thy own home (Swar), by the thoughts of the Truth in thy home, sa ˙m m¯atr.bhir marjayasi sva ¯a dama r.tasya dh¯ıtibhir dame. As if the S¯ama (equal fulﬁlment, sam¯ane ¯urve, in the level wideness) of the higher world (par¯avatah.), is that (Swar) where the thoughts (of the Truth) take their delight.


Sri Aurobindo: By those shining ones of the triple world (or triple elemental nature) he   holds the wide manifestation (of knowledge), shining he holds the wide manifestation.” We see that these cows of the Panis by whom Soma becomes clear and bright in his own home, the home of Agni and the other gods, which we know to be the vast Truth of Swar, r.ta ˙m br.hat, these shining cows who have in them the triple nature of the supreme world, tridh¯atubhir arus.¯ıbhir, and by whom Soma holds the birth or wide manifestation of that Truth,2 are the thoughts which realise the Truth.  This Swar with its three shining worlds in whose wideness there is the equal fulﬁlment of the tridh¯atu, a phrase often used for the supreme triple principle forming the triune highest world, tisrah. par¯avatah., is elsewhere described as the wide and fear-free pasture in which the Cows range at will and take their delight (ran.ayanti) and here too it is that region where the thoughts of the Truth take their delight, yatra ran.anti dh¯ıtayah.. And it is said in the next verse that the divine chariot of Soma follows, getting knowledge, the supreme direction and labours forward, having vision, by the rays, p¯urv¯am anu pradi´sa ˙m y¯ati cekitat, sa ˙m ra´smibhir yatate dar´sato ratho daivyo dar´sato rathah..