Sri Aurobindo: This supreme direction is evidently that of the divine or vast Truth; these rays are evidently the rays of the Dawn or Sun of Truth; they are the cows concealed by the Panis, the illumined thoughts, dhiyah. of the bright hue, r.tasya dh¯ıtayah..  All the internal evidence of the Veda wherever this image of the Panis, the Cows, the Angirases occurs establishes invariably the same conclusion. The Panis are the withholders of the thoughts of the Truth, dwellers in the darkness without knowledge (tamo avayunam) which Indra and the Angirases by the Word, by the Sun replace with Light to manifest in its stead the wideness of the Truth. It is not with physical weapons but with words that Indra ﬁghts the Panis (VI.39.2), pan.¯ın vacobhir abhi yodhad indrah..


Sri Aurobindo: It will be enough to translate without comment 2 Vayah.. Cf. VI.21.2-3, where it is said that Indra who has the knowledge and who upholds our words and is by the words increased in the sacriﬁce, indra ˙m yo vid¯ano girv¯ahasa ˙m g¯ırbhir yaj˜navr.ddham, forms by the Sun into that which has manifestation of knowledge the darkness which had extended itself and in which there was no knowledge, sa it tamo avayuna ˙m tatanvat s¯uryen.a vayunavac cak¯ara.   The Sons of Darkness  the hymn in which this phrase occurs so as to show ﬁnally the nature of this symbolism. “Of this divine and rapturous seer (Soma), bearer of the sacriﬁce, this honeyed speaker with the illumined thought, O god, join to us, to the speaker of the word the impulsions that are led by the cows of light (is.o goagr¯ah.).  He it was who desired the shining ones (the cows, usr¯ah.)


Sri Aurobindo: all about the hill, truth-yoked, yoking his car with the thoughts of the Truth, r.tadh¯ıtibhir r.tayug yuj¯anah.; (then) Indra broke the unbroken hill-level of Vala, by the words he fought against the Panis. He it was (Soma) who as the Moon-Power (Indu) day and night and through the years made the lightless nights to shine out, and they held the vision of the days; he created the dawns pure in their birth. He it was becoming luminous who made full of light the lightless ones; he made the many (dawns) shine by the Truth, he went with horses yoked by the Truth, with the wheel that ﬁnds Swar, satisfying (with the wealth) the doer of works.”  It is always the thought, the Truth, the word that is associated with the Cows of the Panis; by the words of Indra the Divine Mind-Power those who withhold the cows are conquered; that which was dark becomes light; the chariot drawn by the horses yoked by the Truth ﬁnds (by knowledge, svarvid¯a n¯abhin¯a) the luminous vastnesses of being and consciousness and delight now concealed from our vision. “By the brahma Indra pierces Vala, conceals the darkness, makes Swar visible” (II.24.3), ud g¯a ¯ajad abhinad brahman.


Sri Aurobindo: ¯a valam ag¯uhat tamo vyacaks.ayat svah..  The whole Rig Veda is a triumph-chant of the powers of Light, and their ascent by the force and vision of the Truth to its possession in its source and seat where it is free from the attack of the falsehood. “By Truth the cows (illumined thoughts) enter into the Truth; labouring towards the Truth the Truth one conquers; the aggressive force of the Truth seeks the cows of Light and goes breaking through (the enemy); for Truth the two wide ones (Heaven and Earth) become multitudinous and deep, for Truth the two supreme Mothers give their yield,” r.tena g¯ava r.tam ¯a vive´suh.; r.ta ˙m yem¯ana r.tam id vanoti, r.tasya ´sus.mas turay¯a u gavyuh.; r.t¯aya pr.thv¯ı bahule gabh¯ıre, r.t¯aya dhen¯u parame duh¯ate (IV.23.9-10).   Chapter XXII The Conquest over the Dasyus  T


Sri Aurobindo: HE DASYUS stand in opposition to both the Aryan gods and the Aryan seers. The Gods are born from Aditi in the supreme Truth of things, the Dasyus or Danavas from Diti in the nether darkness; they are the Lords of Light and the Lords of Night fronting each other across the triple world of earth, heaven and mid-air, body, mind and the connecting breath of life. Sarama in X.108 descends from the supreme realm, par¯ak¯at; she has to cross the waters of the Ras¯a, she meets the night which gives place to her for fear of her overleaping it, atis.kado bhiyas¯a; she arrives at the home of the Dasyus, dasyor oko na sadanam, which they themselves describe as the reku padam alakam, the world of falsehood beyond the bound of things. The supreme world also surpasses the bound of things by exceeding or transcending it; it is reku padam, but satyam not alakam, the world of the Truth, not the world of the falsehood.


Sri Aurobindo: The latter is the darkness without knowledge, tamo avayuna ˙m tatanvat; Indra when his largeness exceeds (ririce) heaven and earth and mid-world creates for the Aryan the opposite world of truth and knowledge, vayunavat, which exceeds these three domains and is therefore reku padam. This darkness, this lower world of Night and the Inconscient in the formed existence of things symbolised in the image of the mountain which rises from the bowels of earth to the back of heaven, is represented by the secret cave at the base of the hill, the cave of the darkness.  But the cave is only the home of the Panis, their ﬁeld of action is earth and heaven and the mid-world. They are the sons of the Inconscience, but themselves are not precisely inconscient in their action; they have forms of apparent knowledge, m¯ay¯ah., but these are forms of ignorance the truth of which is concealed in the darkness of the inconscient and their surface or front is falsehood, not truth. For the world as we see it has come out  The Conquest over the Dasyus  of the darkness concealed in darkness, the deep and abysmal ﬂood that covered all things, the inconscient ocean, apraketa ˙m salilam (X.129.3); in that non-existence the seers have found by desire in the heart and thought in the mind that which builds up the true existence.


Sri Aurobindo: This non-existence of the truth of things, asat, is the ﬁrst aspect of them that emerges from the inconscient ocean; and its great darkness is the Vedic Night, r¯atr¯ı ˙m jagato nive´san¯ım (I.35.1), which holds the world and all its unrevealed potentialities in her obscure bosom. Night extends her realm over this triple world of ours and out of her in heaven, in the mental being, Dawn is born who delivers the Sun out of the darkness where it was lying concealed and eclipsed and creates the vision of the supreme Day in the non-existence, in the Night, asati ketum. It is therefore in these three realms that the battle between the Lords of Light and the Lords of the Ignorance proceeds through its continual vicissitudes.  The word pan.i means dealer, trafﬁcker, from pan. (also pan,1 cf. Tamil pan., Greek ponos, labour) and we may perhaps regard the Panis as the powers that preside over those ordinary unillumined sense-activities of life whose immediate root is in the dark subconscient physical being and not in the divine mind.


Sri Aurobindo: The whole struggle of man is to replace this action by the luminous working of mind and life which comes from above through the mental existence. Whoever thus aspires, labours, battles, travels, ascends the hill of being is the Aryan (¯arya, arya, ari with the various senses, to toil, to ﬁght, to climb or rise, to travel, to prepare the sacriﬁce); for the work of the Aryan is a sacriﬁce which is at once a battle and an ascent and a journey, a battle against the powers of darkness, an ascent to the highest peaks of the mountain beyond earth and heaven into Swar, a journey to the other shore of the rivers and the ocean into the farthest Inﬁnity of things. The Aryan has the will to the work, he is the doer of the work (k¯aru, k¯ıri, etc.), the gods who put their force 1 Sayana takes pan in Veda — to praise, but in one place he admits the sense of vyavah¯ara, dealing. Action seems to me to be its sense in most passages. From pan.


Sri Aurobindo: in the sense of action we have the earlier names of the organs of action, p¯an.i, hand, foot or hoof, Lat. penis, cf. also p¯ayu.    into his work are sukratu, perfect in power for the sacriﬁce; the Dasyu or Pani is the opposite of both, he is akratu. The Aryan is the sacriﬁcer, yajam¯ana, yajyu; the gods who receive, uphold, impel his sacriﬁce are yajata, yajatra, powers of the sacriﬁce; the Dasyu is the opposite of both, he is ayajyu. The Aryan in the sacriﬁce ﬁnds the divine word, g¯ıh., mantra, brahma, uktha, he is the brahm¯a or singer of the word; the gods delight in and uphold the word, girv¯ahas, girvan.as, the Dasyus are haters and destroyers of the Word, brahmadvis.ah., spoilers of speech, mr.dhrav¯acah..


Sri Aurobindo: They have no force of the divine breath or no mouth to speak it, they are an¯asah.; and they have no power to think and mentalise the word and the truth it contains, they are amanyam¯an¯ah.: but the Aryans are the thinkers of the word, manyam¯an¯ah., holders of the thought, the thought-mind and the seer-knowledge, dh¯ıra, man¯ıs.¯ı, kavi; the gods are also the supreme thinkers of the Thought, prathamo manot¯a dhiyah., kavayah.. The Aryans are desirers of the godheads, devayu, u´sij; they seek to increase their own being and the godheads in them by the sacriﬁce, the word, the thought; the Dasyus are god-haters, devadvis.ah., obstructors of the godhead, devanidah., who desire no increase, avr.dhah..  The gods lavish wealth on the Aryan, the Aryan gives his wealth to the gods; the Dasyu withholds his wealth from the Aryan until it is taken from him by force, and does not press out the immortal Soma wine for the deities who seek its rapture in man; although he is rev¯an, although his cave is packed with cows and horses and treasures, gobhir a´svebhir vasubhir nyr.s.t.am, still he is ar¯adhas, because his wealth gives no prosperity or felicity to man or himself, — the Pani is the miser of existence.


Sri Aurobindo: And in the struggle between the Aryan and the Dasyu he seeks always to plunder and destroy, to steal the luminous cows of the latter and hide them again in the darkness of the cave. “Slay the devourer, the Pani; for he is the wolf (the tearer, vr.kah.)” (VI.51.14) .  It is evident that these descriptions could easily be applied to human enemies who hate the cult and the gods of the Aryan, but we shall see that such an interpretation is entirely impossible because in the hymn I.33 in which these distinctions are most clearly drawn and the battle of Indra and his human allies with  The Conquest over the Dasyus  the Dasyus most elaborately described, these Dasyus, Panis and Vritras, cannot possibly be human ﬁghters, tribes or robbers.


Sri Aurobindo: In this hymn of Hiranyastupa Angirasa the ﬁrst ten verses clearly refer to the battle for the Cows and therefore to the Panis.  “Come, let us go seeking the cows to Indra; for it is he that increases the thought in us; invincible is he and complete are his felicities, he releases for us (separates from the darkness) the supreme knowledge-vision of the luminous cows, gav¯a ˙m keta ˙m param ¯avarjate nah.. I ﬂy to the unassailable giver of riches like a bird to its beloved nest, bowing down to Indra with the supreme words of light, to him to whom his afﬁrmers must call in their journey. He comes with all his armies and has fastened ﬁrmly his quivers; he is the ﬁghter (the Aryan) who brings the cows to whomsoever he desires. O Indra who hast increased (by our word), hold not back for thyself thy much delight, become not in us the Pani, cos.k¯uyam¯an.o bh¯uri v¯ama ˙m m¯a pan.ir bh¯ur asmad adhi pravr.ddha.”


Sri Aurobindo: The last phrase is a striking one and in the current interpretation its real force is avoided by rendering “do not become a miser with regard to us.” But this is to ignore the fact that the Panis are the withholders of the wealth who keep it for themselves and give it neither to god nor man. The sense obviously is “Having thy much wealth of the delight, do not be a Pani, one who holds his possessions only for himself and keeps them from man; do not hold the delight away from us in thy superconscient as the Panis do in their subconscient secrecy.”  Then the hymn describes the Pani, the Dasyu and Indra’s battle with him for the possession of earth and heaven. “Nay, thou slayest with thy weapon the wealthy Dasyu, ranging alone with thy powers that serve thee, O Indra; they on thy bow (the powers as arrows) sped diversely in all directions and they who keep possession and sacriﬁce not went unto their death.


Sri Aurobindo: Their heads were scattered far from them, they who do not sacriﬁce yet strove with the sacriﬁcers, when, O lord of the shining steeds, O strong stander in heaven, thou didst cast out from Heaven and Earth those who observe not the law of thy working (avrat¯an).  They fought against the army of the blameless one; the Navagwas set him on his march; like bullocks who ﬁght against the   bull they were cast out, they came to know what was Indra and ﬂed from him down the slopes. O Indra, thou foughtest them who laughed and wept on the other side of the mid-world (rajasah. p¯are, i.e. on the borders of heaven); thou didst burn down the Dasyu out of heaven from on high, thou didst foster the expression of him who afﬁrms thee and gives the Soma. Making the circle of the earth, they shone in the light of the golden gem (an image for the Sun); but for all their rushing they could not pass beyond Indra, for he set spies all around by the Sun. When thou possessedst earth and heaven all around with thy vastness, O Indra, by the speakers of the word (brahmabhir) thou didst cast out the Dasyu, attacking those who can think not (the Truth) by those who think, amanyam¯an¯an abhi manyam¯anaih..


Sri Aurobindo: They attained not to the end of heaven and earth; Indra, the bull, made the lightning his helper, by the Light he milked the shining cows out of the darkness.”  The battle takes place not on earth but on the other shore of the Antariksha, the Dasyus are driven out of heaven by the ﬂames of the thunderbolt, they circle round the earth and are cast out of both heaven and earth; for they can ﬁnd no place in either heaven or earth, all being now full of the greatness of Indra, nor can conceal themselves anywhere from his lightnings because the Sun with its rays gives him spies whom he sets all round and in the brightness of those rays the Panis are discovered.  This can be no description of an earthly battle between Aryan and Dravidian tribes; neither can the lightning be the physical lightning since that has nothing to do with the destruction of the powers of Night and the milking of the cows of the Dawn out of the darkness. It is clear then that these non-sacriﬁcers, these haters of the word who are incompetent even to think it are not any human enemies of the Aryan cult. They are the powers that strive for possession of heaven and earth in man himself; they are demons and not Dravidians.


Sri Aurobindo: It is noteworthy that they strive, but fail to attain the “limit of earth and heaven”; we may suppose that these powers seek without the word or the sacriﬁce to attain to the higher world beyond earth and heaven which can be conquered only by the  The Conquest over the Dasyus  word and the sacriﬁce. They seek to possess the Truth under the law of the Ignorance; but they are unable to attain to the limit of earth or heaven; only Indra and the Gods can so exceed the formula of mind, life and body after ﬁlling all three with their greatness. Sarama (X.108.6) seems to hint at this ambition of the Panis; “May your words be unable to attain, may your embodiments be evil and inauspicious; may you not violate the path to travel upon it; may Brihaspati not give you happiness of the two worlds (divine and human).” The Panis indeed offer insolently to be friendly with Indra if he will stay in their cave and be the keeper of their cows, to which Sarama answers that Indra is the overcomer of all and cannot be himself overcome and oppressed, and again they offer brotherhood to Sarama if she will dwell with them and not return to the far world whence she has come by the force of the gods against all obstacles, prab¯adhit¯a sahas¯a daivyena. Sarama replies, “I know not brotherhood and sisterhood, Indra knows and the dread Angirases; desiring the Cows they protected me so that I came; depart hence, O Panis, to a better place.


Sri Aurobindo: Depart hence, O Panis, to a better place, let the Cows ye conﬁne go upward by the Truth, the hidden Cows whom Brihaspati ﬁnds and Soma and the pressing-stones and the illumined seers.”  We have the idea also of a voluntary yielding up of their store by the Panis in VI.53, a hymn addressed to the Sun as the Increaser Pushan. “O Pushan, Lord of the Path, we yoke thee like a chariot for the winning of the plenitude, for the Thought. . . . O shining Pushan, impel to giving the Pani, even him who giveth not; soften the mind even of the Pani. Distinguish the paths that lead to the winning of the plenitude, slay the aggressors, let our thoughts be perfected.


Sri Aurobindo: Smite the hearts of the Panis with thy goad, O seer; so make them subject to us. Smite them, O Pushan, with thy goad and desire in the heart of the Pani our delight; so make him subject to us. . . . Thy goad thou bearest that impels the word to rise, O shining seer, with that write thy line on the hearts of all and sever them, (so make them subject to us). Thy goad of which thy ray is the point and which perfects the herds (of   thought-vision, pa´sus¯adhan¯ı, cf. s¯adhant¯a ˙m dhiyah. in verse 4), the delight of that we desire. Create for us the thought that wins the cow, that wins the horse, that wins the plenitude of the wealth.”


Sri Aurobindo: If we are right in our interpretation of this symbol of the Panis, these ideas are sufﬁciently intelligible without depriving the word of its ordinary sense, as does Sayana, and making it mean only a miserly, greedy human being whom the hungerstricken poet is thus piteously importuning the Sun-God to turn to softness and charity. The Vedic idea was that the subconscient darkness and the ordinary life of ignorance held concealed in it all that belongs to the divine life and that these secret riches must be recovered ﬁrst by destroying the impenitent powers of ignorance and then by possessing the lower life subjected to the higher. Of Indra it has been said, as we have seen, that he either slays or conquers the Dasyu and transfers his wealth to the Aryan. So also Sarama refuses peace with alliance to the Panis, but suggests their submission to the gods and the Aryans by the surrender and ascent of the imprisoned cows and their own departure from the darkness to a better place (¯a var¯ıyah.).  And it is by the strenuous touch of the goad of the luminous seer, Pushan, lord of the Truth, the goad that drives open the closed heart and makes the sacred word to arise from its depths, it is by this luminous-pointed goad which perfects the radiant cows, accomplishes the luminous thoughts, that the conversion of the Pani is effected; then the Truth-god in his darkened heart also desires that which the Aryan desires.


Sri Aurobindo: Therefore by this penetrating action of the Light and the Truth the powers of the ordinary ignorant sense-activity become subject to the Aryan.  But, normally, they are his enemies, not d¯asa in the sense of submission and service (d¯asa, servant, from das to work), but in the sense of destruction and injury (d¯asa, dasyu, an enemy, plunderer, from das to divide, hurt, injure). The Pani is the robber who snatches away the cows of light, the horses of the swiftness and the treasures of the divine plenitude, he is the wolf, the eater, atri, vr.ka; he is the obstructor, nid, and spoiler of the word. He is the enemy, the thief, the false or evil thinker who  The Conquest over the Dasyus  makes difﬁcult the Path by his robberies and obstructions; “Cast away utterly far from us the enemy, the thief, the crooked one who places falsely the thought; O master of existence, make our path easy to travel. Slay the Pani for he is the wolf, that devours” (VI.51.13-14).


Sri Aurobindo: His rising to the attack must be checked by the gods. “This god (Soma) in his birth with Indra for helper held back by force the Pani” and won Swar and the sun and all the riches, (VI.44.22). The Panis have to be slain or routed so that their riches may be ravished from them and devoted to the higher life. “Thou who didst sever the Pani in his continuous ranks, thine are these strong givings, O Saraswati. O Saraswati, crush the obstructors of the gods” (VI.61).


Sri Aurobindo: “O Agni and Soma, then was your strength awakened when you robbed the Pani of the cows and found the one Light for many” (I.93.4).  When the gods awake in the Dawn for the sacriﬁce, the Panis must not awake also to interfere with its successful progress; let them sleep in their cavern darkness. “O Dawn, queen of the plenitudes, awaken those who ﬁll us (the gods), but let the Panis sleep unawakening. Richly dawn for the lords of the plenitude, O queen of the Plenitude, richly for him who afﬁrms thee, O Dawn that art Truth. Young she shines out before us, she has created her host of the ruddy cows; in the non-existent vision has dawned out wide” (I.124.10-11).


Sri Aurobindo: Or again in IV.51, “Lo, in front of us that supreme light full of the knowledge has arisen out of the darkness; daughters of heaven shining wide, the Dawns have created the path for the human being. The Dawns stand in front of us like pillars in the sacriﬁces; breaking out pure and purifying they have opened the doors of the pen, the darkness. Breaking forth today the dawns awaken to knowledge the enjoyers for the giving of the rich felicity; within where there is no play of light let the Panis sleep unwaking in the heart of the darkness.” Into this nether darkness they have to be cast down from the higher planes while the Dawns imprisoned by them in that night have to be lifted to the highest planes. “Panis who make the knot of the crookedness, who have not the will to works, spoilers of speech, who have not faith, who increase not, who do not sacriﬁce, them has Agni driven farther and farther; supreme, he has made them   nethermost who will not sacriﬁce.


Sri Aurobindo: And (the Cows, the Dawns) who rejoiced in the nether darkness, by his power he has made to move to the highest. . . . He has broken down by his blows the walls that limit, he has given the Dawns to be possessed by the Aryan,” aryapatn¯ır us.asa´s cak¯ara (VII.6.3-5). The Rivers and Dawns when in the possession of Vritra or Vala are described as d¯asapatn¯ıh.; by the action of the gods they become aryapatn¯ıh., they become the helpmates of the Aryan.  The lords of the ignorance have to be slain or enslaved to the Truth and its seekers, but their wealth is indispensable to the human fulﬁlment; it is as if “on the most wealth-abounding head of the Panis” (VI.45.31) that Indra takes his stand, pan.¯ın¯a ˙m vars.is.t.he m¯urdhann asth¯at; he becomes himself the Cow of Light and the Horse of Swiftness and lavishes an ever-increasing thousandfold wealth. The fullness of that luminous wealth of the Panis and its ascent heavenward is, as we know already, the Path and the birth of the Immortality.


Sri Aurobindo: “The Angiras held the supreme manifestation (of the Truth), they who had lit the ﬁre, by perfect accomplishment of the work; they gained the whole enjoyment of the Pani, its herds of the cows and the horses. Atharvan ﬁrst formed the Path, thereafter Surya was born as the protector of the Law and the Blissful One, tatah. s¯uryo vratap¯a vena ¯ajani.  Ushanas Kavya drove upward the Cows. With them may we win by the sacriﬁce the immortality that is born as a child to the Lord of the Law,” yamasya j¯atam amr.ta ˙m yaj¯amahe (I.83.4-5).


Sri Aurobindo: Angira is the Rishi who represents the Seer-Will, Atharvan is the Rishi of the journeying on the Path, Ushanas Kavya is the Rishi of the heavenward desire that is born from the seer-knowledge.  The Angiras win the wealth of illuminations and powers of the Truth concealed behind the lower life and its crookednesses; Atharvan forms in their strength the Path and Surya the Lord of Light is then born as the guardian of the divine Law and the Yama-power; Ushanas drives the herded illuminations of our thought up that path of the Truth to the Bliss which Surya possesses; so is born from the law of the Truth the immortality to which the Aryan soul by its sacriﬁce aspires.   Chapter XXIII Summary of Conclusions  W E HAVE now closely scrutinised the Angiras legend in the Rig Veda from all possible sides and in all its main symbols and are in a position to summarise ﬁrmly the conclusions we have drawn from it. As I have already said, the Angiras legend and the Vritra mythus are the two principal parables of the Veda; they occur and recur everywhere; they run through the hymns as two closely connected threads of symbolic imagery, and around them all the rest of the Vedic symbolism is woven.


Sri Aurobindo: Not that they are its central ideas, but they are two main pillars of this ancient structure. When we determine their sense, we have determined the sense of the whole Rik Sanhita.  If Vritra and the waters symbolise the cloud and the rain and the gushing forth of the seven rivers of the Punjab and if the Angirases are the bringers of the physical dawn, then the Veda is a symbolism of natural phenomena personiﬁed in the ﬁgure of gods and Rishis and maleﬁcent demons. If Vritra and Vala are Dravidian gods and the Panis and Vritras human enemies, then the Veda is a poetical and legendary account of the invasion of Dravidian India by Nature-worshipping barbarians. If on the other hand this is a symbolism of the struggle between spiritual powers of Light and Darkness, Truth and Falsehood, Knowledge and Ignorance, Death and Immortality, then that is the real sense of the whole Veda.


Sri Aurobindo: We have concluded that the Angiras Rishis are bringers of the Dawn, rescuers of the Sun out of the darkness, but that this Dawn, Sun, Darkness are ﬁgures used with a spiritual significance. The central conception of the Veda is the conquest of the Truth out of the darkness of Ignorance and by the conquest of the Truth the conquest also of Immortality. For the Vedic Ritam is a spiritual as well as a psychological conception. It is the true being, the true consciousness, the true delight of   existence beyond this earth of body, this mid-region of vital force, this ordinary sky or heaven of mind. We have to cross beyond all these planes in order to arrive at the higher plane of that superconscient Truth which is the own home of the gods and the foundation of Immortality.


Sri Aurobindo: This is the world of Swar, to which the Angirases have found the path for their posterity.  The Angirases are at once the divine seers who assist in the cosmic and human workings of the gods and their earthly representatives, the ancient fathers who ﬁrst found the wisdom of which the Vedic hymns are a chant and memory and renewal in experience. The seven divine Angirases are sons or powers of Agni, powers of the Seer-Will, the ﬂame of divine Force instinct with divine knowledge which is kindled for the victory.  The Bhrigus have found this Flame secret in the growths of the earthly existence, but the Angirases kindle it on the altar of sacriﬁce and maintain the sacriﬁce through the periods of the sacriﬁcial year symbolising the periods of the divine labour by which the Sun of Truth is recovered out of the darkness. Those who sacriﬁce for nine months of this year are Navagwas, seers of the nine cows or nine rays, who institute the search for the herds of the Sun and the march of Indra to battle with the Panis.


Sri Aurobindo: Those who sacriﬁce for ten months are the Dashagwas, seers of the ten rays who enter with Indra into the cave of the Panis and recover the lost herds.  The sacriﬁce is the giving by man of what he possesses in his being to the higher or divine nature and its fruit is the farther enrichment of his manhood by the lavish bounty of the gods.  The wealth thus gained constitutes a state of spiritual riches, prosperity, felicity which is itself a power for the journey and a force of battle.


Sri Aurobindo: For the sacriﬁce is a journey, a progression; the sacriﬁce itself travels led by Agni up the divine path to the gods and of this journey the ascent of the Angiras fathers to the divine world of Swar is the type. Their journey of the sacriﬁce is also a battle, for it is opposed by Panis, Vritras and other powers of evil and falsehood, and of this warfare the conﬂict of Indra and the Angirases with the Panis is a principal episode.   Summary of Conclusions   The principal features of sacriﬁce are the kindling of the divine ﬂame, the offering of the ghr.ta and the Soma wine and the chanting of the sacred word. By the hymn and the offering the gods are increased; they are said to be born, created or manifested in man and by their increase and greatness here they increase the earth and heaven, that is to say, the physical and mental existence to their utmost capacity and, exceeding these, create in their turn the higher worlds or planes.


Sri Aurobindo: The higher existence is the divine, the inﬁnite of which the shining Cow, the inﬁnite Mother, Aditi, is the symbol; the lower is subject to her dark form Diti. The object of the sacriﬁce is to win the higher or divine being and possess with it and make subject to its law and truth the lower or human existence. The ghr.ta of the sacriﬁce is the yield of the shining Cow; it is the clarity or brightness of the solar light in the human mentality. The Soma is the immortal delight of existence secret in the waters and the plant and pressed out for drinking by gods and men. The word is the inspired speech expressing the thought-illumination of the Truth which rises out of the soul, formed in the heart, shaped by the mind.


Sri Aurobindo: Agni growing by the ghr.ta, Indra forceful with the luminous strength and joy of the Soma and increased by the Word, aid the Angirases to recover the herds of the Sun.  Brihaspati is the Master of the creative Word. If Agni is the supreme Angiras, the ﬂame from whom the Angirases are born, Brihaspati is the one Angiras with the seven mouths, the seven rays of the illuminative thought and the seven words which express it, of whom these seers are the powers of utterance. It is the complete thought of the Truth, the seven-headed, which wins the fourth or divine world for man by winning for him the complete spiritual wealth, object of the sacriﬁce. Therefore Agni, Indra, Brihaspati, Soma are all described as winners of the herds of the Sun and destroyers of the Dasyus who conceal and withhold them from man.


Sri Aurobindo: Saraswati, who is the stream of the Word or inspiration of the Truth, is also a Dasyu-slayer and winner of the shining herds; and they are discovered by Sarama, forerunner of Indra, who is a solar or dawn goddess and seems to symbolise the intuitive power of the Truth. Usha, the Dawn,   is at once herself a worker in the great victory and in her full advent its luminous result.  Usha is the divine Dawn, for the Sun that arises by her coming is the Sun of the superconscient Truth; the day he brings is the day of the true life in the true knowledge, the night he dispels is the night of the ignorance which yet conceals the dawn in its bosom. Usha herself is the Truth, s¯unr.t¯a, and the mother of Truths. These truths of the divine Dawn are called her cows, her shining herds; while the forces of the Truth that accompany them and occupy the Life are called her horses.


Sri Aurobindo: Around this symbol of the cows and horses much of the Vedic symbolism turns; for these are the chief elements of the riches sought by man from the gods. The cows of the Dawn have been stolen and concealed by the demons, the lords of darkness in their nether cave of the secret subconscient. They are the illuminations of knowledge, the thoughts of the Truth, g¯avo matayah., which have to be delivered out of their imprisonment. Their release is the upsurging of the powers of the divine Dawn.  It is also the recovery of the Sun that was lying in the darkness; for it is said that the Sun, “that Truth”, was the thing found by Indra and the Angirases in the cave of the Panis.


Sri Aurobindo: By the rending of that cave the herds of the divine dawn which are the rays of the Sun of Truth ascend the hill of being and the Sun itself ascends to the luminous upper ocean of the divine existence, led over it by the thinkers like a ship over the waters, till it reaches its farther shore.  The Panis who conceal the herds, the masters of the nether cavern, are a class of Dasyus who are in the Vedic symbolism set in opposition to the Aryan gods and Aryan seers and workers.  The Aryan is he who does the work of sacriﬁce, ﬁnds the sacred word of illumination, desires the Gods and increases them and is increased by them into the largeness of the true existence; he is the warrior of the light and the traveller to the Truth.  The Dasyu is the undivine being who does no sacriﬁce, amasses a wealth he cannot rightly use because he cannot speak the word or mentalise the superconscient Truth, hates the Word, the gods and the sacriﬁce and gives nothing of himself to the higher   Summary of Conclusions


Sri Aurobindo: existences but robs and withholds his wealth from the Aryan .  He is the thief, the enemy, the wolf, the devourer, the divider, the obstructor, the conﬁner. The Dasyus are powers of darkness and ignorance who oppose the seeker of truth and immortality.


Sri Aurobindo: The gods are the powers of Light, the children of Inﬁnity, forms and personalities of the one Godhead who by their help and by their growth and human workings in man raise him to the truth and the immortality.  Thus the interpretation of the Angiras myth gives us the key to the whole secret of the Veda. For if the cows and horses lost by the Aryans and recovered for them by the gods, the cows and horses of which Indra is the lord and giver and indeed himself the Cow and Horse, are not physical cattle, if these elements of the wealth sought by the sacriﬁce are symbols of a spiritual riches, so also must be its other elements which are always associated with them, sons, men, gold, treasure, etc. If the Cow of which the ghr.ta is the yield is not a physical cow but the shining Mother, then the ghr.ta itself which is found in the waters and is said to be triply secreted by the Panis in the Cow, is no physical offering, nor the honey-wine of Soma either which is also said to exist in the rivers and to rise in a honeyed wave from the ocean and to ﬂow streaming up to the gods. And if these, then also the other offerings of the sacriﬁce must be symbolic; the outer sacriﬁce itself can be nothing but the symbol of an inner giving. And if the Angiras Rishis are also in part symbolic or are, like the gods, semi-divine workers and helpers in the sacriﬁce, so also must be the Bhrigus, Atharvans, Ushana and Kutsa and others who are associated with them in their work.


Sri Aurobindo: If the Angiras legend and the story of the struggle with the Dasyus is a parable, so also should be the other legendary stories we ﬁnd in the Rig Veda of the help given by the Gods to the Rishis against the demons; for these also are related in similar terms and constantly classed by the Vedic poets along with the Angiras story as on the same footing.  Similarly if these Dasyus who refuse the gift and the sacriﬁce, and hate the Word and the gods and with whom the Aryans are constantly at war, these Vritras, Panis and others, are not human   enemies but powers of darkness, falsehood and evil, then the whole idea of the Aryan wars and kings and nations begins to take upon itself the aspect of spiritual symbol and apologue.  Whether they are entirely so or only partly, cannot be decided except by a more detailed examination which is not our present object. Our object is only to see whether there is a prima facie case for the idea with which we started that the Vedic hymns are the symbolic gospel of the ancient Indian mystics and their sense spiritual and psychological. Such a prima facie case we have established; for there is already sufﬁcient ground for seriously approaching the Veda from this standpoint and interpreting it in detail as such a lyric symbolism.


Sri Aurobindo: Still, to make our case entirely ﬁrm it will be well to examine the other companion legend of Vritra and the waters which we have seen to be closely connected with that of the Angirases and the Light. In the ﬁrst place Indra the Vritra-slayer is along with Agni one of the two chief gods of the Vedic Pantheon and if his character and functions can be properly established, we shall have the general type of the Aryan gods ﬁxed ﬁrmly. Secondly, the Maruts, his companions, singers of the sacred chant, are the strongest point of the naturalistic theory of Vedic worship; they are undoubtedly storm-gods and no other of the greater Vedic deities, Agni or the Ashwins or Varuna and Mitra or Twashtri and the goddesses or even Surya the Sun or Usha the Dawn have such a pronounced physical character. If then these storm-gods can be shown to have a psychological character and symbolism, then there can be no farther doubt about the profounder sense of the Vedic religion and ritual. Finally, if Vritra and his associated demons, Shushna, Namuchi and the rest appear when closely scrutinised to be Dasyus in the spiritual sense and if the meaning of the heavenly waters he obstructs be more thoroughly investigated, then the consideration of the stories of the Rishis and the gods and demons as parables can be proceeded with from a sure starting-point and the symbolism of the Vedic worlds brought nearer to a satisfactory interpretation.


Sri Aurobindo: More we cannot at present attempt; for the Vedic symbolism as worked out in the hymns is too complex in its details, too   Summary of Conclusions  numerous in its standpoints, presents too many obscurities and difﬁculties to the interpreter in its shades and side allusions and above all has been too much obscured by ages of oblivion and misunderstanding to be adequately dealt with in a single work.  We can only at present seek out the leading clues and lay as securely as may be the right foundations.    The Doctrine of the Mystics


Sri Aurobindo: T HE VEDA possesses the high spiritual substance of the Upanishads, but lacks their phraseology; it is an inspired knowledge as yet insufﬁciently equipped with intellectual and philosophical terms. We ﬁnd a language of poets and illuminates to whom all experience is real, vivid, sensible, even concrete, not yet of thinkers and systematisers to whom the realities of the mind and soul have become abstractions. Yet a system, a doctrine there is; but its structure is supple, its terms  are concrete, the cast of its thought is practical and experimental, but in the accomplished type of an old and sure experience, not of one that is crude and uncertain because yet in the making.  Here we have the ancient psychological science and the art of spiritual living of which the Upanishads are the philosophical outcome and modiﬁcation and Vedanta, Sankhya and Yoga the late intellectual result and logical dogma.


Sri Aurobindo: But like all life, like all science that is still vital, it is free from the armoured rigidities of the reasoning intellect; in spite of its established symbols and sacred formulae it is still large, free, ﬂexible, ﬂuid, supple and subtle. It has the movement of life and the large breath of the soul. And while the later philosophies are books of Knowledge and make liberation the one supreme good, the Veda is a Book of Works and the hope for which it spurns our present bonds and littleness is perfection, self-achievement, immortality.  The doctrine of the Mystics recognises an Unknowable, Timeless and Unnameable behind and above all things and not seizable by the studious pursuit of the mind. Impersonally, it is That, the One Existence; to the pursuit of our personality it reveals itself out of the secrecy of things as the God or Deva, — nameless though he has many names, immeasurable and beyond description, though he holds in himself all description of name  The Doctrine of the Mystics  and knowledge and all measures of form and substance, force and activity.


Sri Aurobindo: The Deva or Godhead is both the original cause and the ﬁnal result. Divine Existent, builder of the worlds, lord and begetter of all things, Male and Female, Being and Consciousness, Father and Mother of the Worlds and their inhabitants, he is also their Son and ours: for he is the Divine Child born into the Worlds who manifests himself in the growth of the creature. He is Rudra and Vishnu, Prajapati and Hiranyagarbha, Surya, Agni, Indra, Vayu, Soma, Brihaspati, — Varuna and Mitra and Bhaga and Aryaman, all the gods. He is the wise, mighty and liberating Son born from our works and our sacriﬁce, the Hero in our warfare and Seer of our knowledge, the White Steed in the front of our days who gallops towards the upper Ocean.  The soul of man soars as the Bird, the Hansa, past the shining ﬁrmaments of physical and mental consciousness, climbs as the traveller and ﬁghter beyond earth of body and heaven of mind by the ascending path of the Truth to ﬁnd this Godhead waiting for us, leaning down to us from the secrecy of the highest supreme where it is seated in the triple divine Principle and the source of the Beatitude.


Sri Aurobindo: The Deva is indeed, whether attracting and exalted there or here helpful to us in the person of the greater Gods, always the Friend and Lover of man, the pastoral Master of the Herds who gives us the sweet milk and the clariﬁed butter from the udder of the shining Cow of the inﬁnitude. He is the source and outpourer of the ambrosial Wine of divine delight  and we drink it drawn from the sevenfold waters of existence or pressed out from the luminous plant on the hill of being and uplifted by its raptures we become immortal.  Such are some of the images of this ancient mystic adoration.  The Godhead has built this universe in a complex system of worlds which we ﬁnd both within us and without, subjectively cognised and objectively sensed.


Sri Aurobindo: It is a rising tier of earths and heavens; it is a stream of diverse waters; it is a Light of seven rays, or of eight or nine or ten; it is a Hill of many plateaus. The seers often image it in a series of trios; there are three earths and   Hymns of the Atris three heavens. More, there is a triple world below, — Heaven, Earth and the intervening mid-region; a triple world between, the shining heavens of the Sun; a triple world above, the supreme and rapturous abodes of the Godhead.  But other principles intervene and make the order of the worlds yet more complex. These principles are psychological; for since all creation is a formation of the Spirit, every external system of worlds must in each of its planes be in material correspondence with some power or rising degree of consciousness of which it is the objective symbol and must house a kindred internal order of things.


Sri Aurobindo: To understand the Veda we must seize this Vedic parallelism and distinguish the cosmic gradations to which it leads. We rediscover the same system behind the later Puranic symbols and it is thence that we can derive its tabulated series most simply and clearly. For there are seven principles of existence and the seven Puranic worlds correspond to them with sufﬁcient precision, thus: —  Principle World 1.  Pure Existence — Sat World of the highest truth of being (Satyaloka) 2. Pure Consciousness — World of inﬁnite Will or conChit scious force (Tapoloka) 3. Pure Bliss — Ananda World of creative delight of existence (Janaloka)


Sri Aurobindo: 4. Knowledge or Truth — World of the Vastness Vijnana (Maharloka) 5.  Mind World of light (Swar) 6.  Life (nervous being) Worlds of various becoming (Bhuvar) 7.  Matter The material world (Bhur)


Sri Aurobindo: Now this system which in the Purana is simple enough, is a good deal more intricate in the Veda. There the three highest worlds are classed together as the triple divine Principle, — for they dwell always together in a Trinity; inﬁnity is their scope, bliss is their foundation. They are supported by the vast regions  The Doctrine of the Mystics  of the Truth whence a divine Light radiates out towards our mentality in the three heavenly luminous worlds of Swar, the domain of Indra. Below is ranked the triple system in which we live.  We have the same cosmic gradations as in the Puranas but they are differently grouped, — seven worlds in principle, ﬁve in practice, three in their general groupings: 1. The Supreme Sat-ChitAnanda The triple divine worlds 2. The Link-World Supermind The Truth, Right, Vast, manifested in Swar, with its three luminous heavens 3.


Sri Aurobindo: The triple lower world Pure Mind Heaven (Dyaus, the three heavens) Life-force The Mid-Region (Antariksha) Matter Earth (the three earths)  And as each principle can be modiﬁed by the subordinate manifestation of the others within it, each world is divisible into several provinces according to different arrangements and self-orderings of its creative light of consciousness. Into this framework, then, we must place all the complexities of the subtle vision and fertile imagery of the seers down to the hundred cities which are now in the possession of the hostile kings, the Lords of division and evil. But the gods shall break them open and give them for his free possession to the Aryan worshipper!  But where are these worlds and whence are they created?


Sri Aurobindo: Here we have one of the profoundest ideas of the Vedic sages.  Man dwells in the bosom of the Earth-Mother and is aware of this world of mortality only; but there is a superconscient high beyond where the divine worlds are seated in a luminous secrecy; there is a subconscient or inconscient below his surface waking impressions and from that pregnant Night the worlds as he sees them are born. And these other worlds between the luminous upper and the tenebrous lower ocean? They are here.    Hymns of the Atris Man draws from the life-world his vital being, from the mindworld his mentality; he is ever in secret communication with them; he can consciously enter into them, be born into them, if he will.


Sri Aurobindo: Even into the solar worlds of the Truth he can rise, enter the portals of the Superconscient, cross the threshold of the Supreme. The divine doors shall swing open to his increasing soul.  This human ascension is possible because every being really holds in himself all that his outward vision perceives as if external to him. We have subjective faculties hidden in us which correspond to all the tiers and strata of the objective cosmic system and these form for us so many planes of our possible existence. This material life and our narrowly limited consciousness of the physical world are far from being the sole experience permitted to man, — be he a thousand times the Son of Earth.


Sri Aurobindo: If maternal Earth bore him and retains him in her arms, yet is Heaven also one of his parents and has a claim on his being. It is open to him to become awake to profounder depths and higher heights within and such awakening is his intended progress. And as he mounts thus to higher and ever higher planes of himself, new worlds open to his life and his vision and become the ﬁeld of his experience and the home of his spirit. He lives in contact and union with their powers and godheads and remoulds himself in their image. Each ascent is thus a new birth of the soul, and the Veda calls the worlds “births” as well as seats and dwelling-places.


Sri Aurobindo: For as the Gods have built the series of the cosmic worlds, even so they labour to build up the same series of ordered states and ascending degrees in man’s consciousness from the mortal condition to the crowning immortality. They raise him from the limited material state of being in which our lowest manhood dwells contented and subject to the Lords of Division, give him a life rich and abundant with the many and rapid shocks and impulsions from the dynamic worlds of Life and Desire where the Gods battle with the demons and raise him yet higher from those troubled rapidities and intensities into the steadfast purity and clarity of the high mental existence. For pure thought and  The Doctrine of the Mystics  feeling are man’s sky, his heaven; this whole vitalistic existence of emotion, passions, affections of which desire is the pivot, forms for him a mid-world; body and material living are his earth.  But pure thought and pure psychic state are not the highest height of the human ascension. The home of the Gods is an absolute Truth which lives in solar glories beyond mind.


Sri Aurobindo: Man ascending thither strives no longer as the thinker but is victoriously the seer; he is no longer this mental creature but a divine being.  His will, life, thought, emotion, sense, act are all transformed into values of an all-puissant Truth and remain no longer an embarrassed or a helpless tangle of mixed truth and falsehood.  He moves lamely no more in our narrow and grudging limits but ranges in the unobstructed Vast; toils and zigzags no longer amid these crookednesses, but follows a swift and conquering straightness; feeds no longer on broken fragments, but is suckled by the teats of Inﬁnity. Therefore he has to break through and out beyond these ﬁrmaments of earth and heaven; conquering ﬁrm possession of the solar worlds, entering on to his highest Height he has to learn how to dwell in the triple principle of Immortality.  This contrast of the mortality we are and the immortal condition to which we can aspire is the key of the Vedic thought and practice.


Sri Aurobindo: Veda is the earliest gospel we have of man’s immortality  and these ancient stanzas conceal the primitive discipline of its inspired discoverers.  Substance of being, light of consciousness, active force and possessive delight are the constituent principles of existence; but their combination in us may be either limited, divided, hurt, broken and obscure or inﬁnite, enlightened, vast, whole and unhurt. Limited and divided being is ignorance; it is darkness and weakness, it is grief and pain; in the Vast, in the integral, in the inﬁnite we must seek for the desirable riches of substance, light, force and joy. Limitation is mortality; immortality comes to us as an accomplished self-possession in the inﬁnite and the power to live and move in ﬁrm vastnesses.


Sri Aurobindo: Therefore it is in proportion as he widens and on condition that he increases constantly in   Hymns of the Atris substance of his being, brightens an ever loftier ﬂame of will and vaster light of knowledge, advances the boundaries of his consciousness, raises the degrees and enlarges the breadth of his power, force and strength, conﬁrms an intenser beatitude of joy and liberates his soul into immeasurable peace that man becomes capable of immortality.  To widen is to acquire new births. The aspiring material creature becomes the straining vital man; he in turn transmutes himself into the subtle mental and psychical being; this subtle thinker grows into the wide, multiple and cosmic man open on all sides of him to all the multitudinous inﬂowings of the Truth; the cosmic soul rising in attainment strives as the spiritual man for a higher peace, joy and harmony. These are the ﬁve Aryan types, each of them a great people occupying its own province or state of the total human nature. But there is also the absolute Aryan who would conquer and pass beyond these states to the transcendental harmony of them all.


Sri Aurobindo: It is the supramental Truth that is the instrument of this great inner transﬁguration. That replaces mentality by luminous vision and the eye of the gods, mortal life by breath and force of the inﬁnite existence, obscure and death-possessed substance by the free and immortal conscious-being. The progress of man must be therefore, ﬁrst, his self-expanding into a puissant vitality capable of sustaining all vibrations of action and experience and a clear mental and psychical purity; secondly, an outgrowing of this human light and power and its transmutation into an inﬁnite Truth and an immortal Will.  Our normal life and consciousness are a dark or at best a starlit Night. Dawn comes by the arising of the Sun of that higher Truth and with Dawn there comes the effective sacriﬁce.


Sri Aurobindo: By the sacriﬁce the Dawn itself and the lost Sun are constantly conquered out of the returning Night and the luminous herds rescued from the darkling cave of the Panis; by the sacriﬁce the rain of the abundance of heaven is poured out for us and the sevenfold waters of the higher existence descend impetuously upon our earth because the coils of the obscuring Python, the allenfolding and all-withholding Vritra, have been cloven asunder   The Doctrine of the Mystics  by the God-Mind’s ﬂashing lightnings ; in the sacriﬁce the Soma wine is distilled and uplifts us on the stream of its immortalising ecstasy to the highest heavens.  Our sacriﬁce is the offering of all our gains and works to the powers of the higher existence. The whole world is a dumb and helpless sacriﬁce in which the soul is bound as a victim selfoffered to unseen Gods.


Sri Aurobindo: The liberating Word must be found, the illuminating hymn must be framed in the heart and mind of man and his life must be turned into a conscious and voluntary offering in which the soul is no longer the victim, but the master of the sacriﬁce. By right sacriﬁce and by the all-creative and allexpressive Word that shall arise out of his depths as a sublime hymn to the Gods man can achieve all things. He shall conquer his perfection; Nature shall come to him as a willing and longing bride; he shall become her seer and rule her as her King.  By the hymn of prayer and God-attraction, by the hymn of praise and God-afﬁrmation, by the hymn of God-attainment and self-expression man can house in himself the Gods, build in this gated house of his being the living image of their deity, grow into divine births, form within himself vast and luminous worlds for his soul to inhabit. By the word of the Truth the all-engendering Surya creates; by that rhythm Brahmanaspati evokes the worlds and Twashtri fashions them; ﬁnding the allpuissant Word in his intuitive heart, shaping it in his mind the human thinker, the mortal creature can create in himself all the forms, all the states and conditions he desires and, achieving, can conquer for himself all wealth of being, light, strength and enjoyment.


Sri Aurobindo: He builds up his integral being and aids his gods to destroy the evil armies; the hosts of his spiritual enemies are slain who have divided, torn and afﬂicted his nature.  The image of this sacriﬁce is sometimes that of a journey or voyage; for it travels, it ascends; it has a goal — the vastness, the true existence, the light, the felicity — and it is called upon to discover and keep the good, the straight and the happy path to the goal, the arduous, yet joyful road of the Truth. It has  to climb, led by the ﬂaming strength of the divine Will, from   Hymns of the Atris plateau to plateau as of a mountain, it has to cross as in a ship the waters of existence, traverse its rivers, overcome their deep pits and rapid currents; its aim is to arrive at the far-off ocean of light and inﬁnity.  And this is no easy or peaceful march; it is for long seasons a ﬁerce and relentless battle.


Sri Aurobindo: Constantly the Aryan man has to labour and to ﬁght and conquer; he must be a tireless toiler and traveller and a stern warrior, he must force open and storm and sack city after city, win kingdom after kingdom, overthrow and tread down ruthlessly enemy after enemy. His whole progress is a warring of Gods and Titans, Gods and Giants, Indra and the Python, Aryan and Dasyu. Aryan adversaries even he has to face in the open ﬁeld; for old friends and helpers turn into enemies; the kings of Aryan states he would conquer and overpass join themselves to the Dasyus and are leagued against him in supreme battle to prevent his free and utter passing on.  But the Dasyu is the natural enemy. These dividers, plunderers, harmful powers, these Danavas, sons of the Mother of division, are spoken of by the Rishis under many general appellations.


Sri Aurobindo: There are Rakshasas; there are Eaters and Devourers, Wolves and Tearers; there are hurters and haters; there are dualisers; there are conﬁners or censurers. But we are given also many speciﬁc names. Vritra, the Serpent, is the grand Adversary; for he obstructs with his coils of darkness all possibility of divine existence and divine action. And even when Vritra is slain by the light, ﬁercer enemies arise out of him. Shushna afﬂicts us with his impure and ineffective force, Namuchi ﬁghts man by his weaknesses, and others too assail, each with his proper evil.


Sri Aurobindo: Then there are Vala and the Panis, miser trafﬁckers in the sense-life, stealers and concealers of the higher Light and its illuminations which they can only darken and misuse, — an impious host who are jealous of their store and will not offer sacriﬁce to the Gods. These and other personalities — they are much more than personiﬁcations — of our ignorance, evil, weakness and many limitations make constant war upon man; they encircle him from near or they shoot their arrows at him from afar or even dwell in his gated house in the place of the  The Doctrine of the Mystics  Gods and with their shapeless stammering mouths and their insufﬁcient breath of force mar his self-expression. They must be expelled, overpowered, slain, thrust down into their nether darkness by the aid of the mighty and helpful deities.   The Vedic deities are names, powers, personalities of the universal Godhead and they represent each some essential puissance of the Divine Being.


Sri Aurobindo: They manifest the cosmos and are manifest in it. Children of Light, Sons of the Inﬁnite, they recognise in the soul of man their brother and ally and desire to help and increase him by themselves increasing in him so as to possess his world with their light, strength and beauty. The Gods call man to a divine companionship and alliance; they attract and uplift him to their luminous fraternity, invite his aid and offer theirs against the Sons of Darkness and Division. Man in return calls the Gods to his sacriﬁce, offers to them his swiftnesses and his strengths, his clarities and his sweetnesses, — milk and butter of the shining Cow, distilled juices of the Plant of Joy, the Horse of the Sacriﬁce, the cake and the wine, the grain for the GodMind’s radiant coursers. He receives them into his being and their gifts into his life, increases them by the hymn and the wine and forms perfectly — as a smith forges iron, says the Veda — their great and luminous godheads.


Sri Aurobindo: All this Vedic imagery is easy to understand when once we have the key, but it must not be mistaken for mere imagery. The Gods are not simply poetical personiﬁcations of abstract ideas or of psychological and physical functions of Nature. To the Vedic seers they are living realities; the vicissitudes of the human soul represent a cosmic struggle not merely of principles and tendencies but of the cosmic Powers which support and embody them. These are the Gods and the Demons. On the world-stage and in the individual soul the same real drama with the same personages is enacted.


Sri Aurobindo: To what gods shall the sacriﬁce be offered? Who shall be invoked to manifest and protect in the human being this increasing godhead?  Agni ﬁrst, for without him the sacriﬁcial ﬂame cannot burn   Hymns of the Atris on the altar of the soul. That ﬂame of Agni is the seven-tongued power of the Will, a Force of God instinct with knowledge. This conscious and forceful will is the immortal guest in our mortality, a pure priest and a divine worker, the mediator between earth and heaven.


Sri Aurobindo: It carries what we offer to the higher Powers and brings back in return their force and light and joy into our humanity.   Indra, the Puissant next, who is the power of pure Existence self-manifested as the Divine Mind. As Agni is one pole of Force instinct with knowledge that sends its current upward from earth to heaven, so Indra is the other pole of Light instinct with force which descends from heaven to earth. He comes down into our world as the Hero with the shining horses and slays darkness and division with his lightnings, pours down the life-giving heavenly waters, ﬁnds in the trace of the hound, Intuition, the lost or hidden illuminations, makes the Sun of Truth mount high in the heaven of our mentality.


Sri Aurobindo: Surya, the Sun, is the master of that supreme Truth, — truth of being, truth of knowledge, truth of process and act and movement and functioning. He is therefore the creator or rather the manifester of all things — for creation is outbringing, expression by the Truth and Will — and the father, fosterer, enlightener of our souls. The illuminations we seek are the herds of this Sun who comes to us in the track of the divine Dawn and releases and reveals in us night-hidden world after world up to the highest Beatitude.  Of that beatitude Soma is the representative deity. The wine of his ecstasy


Sri Aurobindo: is concealed in the growths of earth, in the waters of existence; even here in our physical being are his immortalising juices and they have to be pressed out and offered to all the gods;  for in that strength these shall increase and conquer.  Each of these primary deities has others associated with him who fulﬁl functions that arise from his own. For if the truth of Surya is to be established ﬁrmly in our mortal nature, there are previous conditions that are indispensable; a vast purity and clear wideness destructive of all sin and crooked falsehood, — and this is Varuna; a luminous power of love  The Doctrine of the Mystics  and comprehension leading and forming into harmony all our thoughts, acts and impulses, — this is Mitra; an immortal puissance of clear-discerning aspiration and endeavour, — this is Aryaman; a happy spontaneity of the right enjoyment of all things dispelling the evil dream of sin and error and suffering, — this is Bhaga. These four are powers of the Truth of Surya.


Sri Aurobindo: For the whole bliss of Soma to be established perfectly in our nature a happy and enlightened and unmaimed condition of mind, vitality and body are necessary. This condition is given to us by the twin Ashwins; wedded to the daughter of Light, drinkers of honey, bringers of perfect satisfactions, healers of maim and malady they occupy our parts of knowledge and parts of action and prepare our mental, vital and physical being for an easy and victorious ascension.  Indra, the Divine Mind, as the shaper of mental forms has for his assistants, his artisans, the Ribhus, human powers who by the work of sacriﬁce and their brilliant ascension to the high dwelling-place of the Sun have attained to immortality and help mankind to repeat their achievement. They shape by the mind Indra’s horses, the Ashwins’ chariot, the weapons of the Gods, all the means of the journey and the battle. But as giver of the Light of truth and as Vritra-slayer Indra is aided by the Maruts, who are powers of will and nervous or vital Force that have attained to the light of thought and the voice of self-expression.


Sri Aurobindo: They are behind all thought and speech as its impellers and they battle towards the Light, Truth and Bliss of the supreme Consciousness.  There are also female energies; for the Deva is both Male and Female and the gods also are either activising souls or passively executive and methodising energies. Aditi, inﬁnite Mother of the gods, comes ﬁrst; and there are besides ﬁve powers of the Truthconsciousness, — Mahi or Bharati, the vast Word that brings us all things out of the divine source; Ila, the strong primal word of the Truth who gives us its active vision; Saraswati, its streaming current and the word of its inspiration; Sarama, the Intuition, hound of heaven who descends into the cavern of the subconscient and ﬁnds there the concealed illuminations;   Hymns of the Atris Dakshina, whose function is to discern rightly, dispose the action and the offering and distribute in the sacriﬁce to each godhead its portion. Each god, too, has his female energy.  All this action and struggle and ascension is supported by Heaven our Father and Earth our Mother, Parents of the Gods, who sustain respectively the purely mental and psychic and the physical consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: Their large and free scope is the condition of our achievement. Vayu, Master of life, links them together by the mid-air, the region of vital force. And there are other deities, — Parjanya, giver of the rain of heaven; Dadhikravan, the divine war-horse, a power of Agni; the mystic Dragon of the Foundations; Trita Aptya who on the third plane of existence consummates our triple being; and more besides.  The development of all these godheads is necessary to our perfection. And that perfection must be attained on all our levels, — in the wideness of earth, our physical being and consciousness; in the full force of vital speed and action and enjoyment and nervous vibration, typiﬁed as the Horse which must be brought forward to upbear our endeavour; in the perfect gladness of the heart of emotion and a brilliant heat and clarity of the mind throughout our intellectual and psychical being; in the coming of the supramental Light, the Dawn and the Sun and the shining Mother of the herds, to transform all our existence; for so comes to us the possession of the Truth, by the Truth the admirable surge of the Bliss, in the Bliss inﬁnite Consciousness of absolute being.


Sri Aurobindo: Three great Gods, origin of the Puranic Trinity, largest puissances of the supreme Godhead, make possible this development and upward evolution; they support in its grand lines and fundamental energies all these complexities of the cosmos.  Brahmanaspati is the Creator; by the word, by his cry he creates, — that is to say, he expresses, he brings out all existence and conscious knowledge and movement of life and eventual forms from the darkness of the Inconscient. Rudra, the Violent and Merciful, the Mighty One, presides over the struggle of life to afﬁrm itself; he is the armed, wrathful and beneﬁcent Power of God who lifts forcibly the creation upward, smites all  The Doctrine of the Mystics  that opposes, scourges all that errs and resists, heals all that is wounded and suffers and complains and submits. Vishnu of the vast pervading motion holds in his triple stride all these worlds; it is he that makes a wide room for the action of Indra in our limited mortality; it is by him and with him that we rise into his highest seats where we ﬁnd waiting for us the Friend, the Beloved, the Beatiﬁc Godhead.


Sri Aurobindo: Our earth shaped out of the dark inconscient ocean of existence lifts its high formations and ascending peaks heavenward; heaven of mind has its own formations, clouds that give out their lightnings and their waters of life; the streams of the clarity and the honey ascend out of the subconscient ocean below and seek the superconscient ocean above; and from above that ocean sends downward its rivers of the light and truth and bliss even into our physical being. Thus in images of physical Nature the Vedic poets sing the hymn of our spiritual ascension.  That ascension has already been effected by the Ancients, the human forefathers, and the spirits of these great Ancestors still assist their offspring; for the new dawns repeat the old and lean forward in light to join the dawns of the future. Kanwa, Kutsa, Atri, Kakshiwan, Gotama, Shunahshepa have become types of certain spiritual victories which tend to be constantly repeated in the experience of humanity. The seven sages, the Angirasas, are waiting still and always, ready to chant the word, to rend the cavern, to ﬁnd the lost herds, to recover the hidden Sun.


Sri Aurobindo: Thus the soul is a battleﬁeld full of helpers and hurters, friends and enemies. All this lives, teems, is personal, is conscious, is active.  We create for ourselves by the sacriﬁce and by the word shining seers, heroes to ﬁght for us, children of our works. The Rishis and the Gods ﬁnd for us our luminous herds; the Ribhus fashion by the mind the chariots of the gods and their horses and their shining weapons. Our life is a horse that neighing and galloping bears us onward and upward; its forces are swift-hooved steeds, the liberated powers of the mind are wide-winging birds; this mental being or this soul is the upsoaring Swan or the Falcon that breaks out from a hundred iron walls and wrests from the jealous guardians of felicity the wine of the Soma.


Sri Aurobindo: Every shining   Hymns of the Atris godward Thought that arises from the secret abysses of the heart is a priest and a creator and chants a divine hymn of luminous realisation and puissant fulﬁlment. We seek for the shining gold of the Truth; we lust after a heavenly treasure.  The soul of man is a world full of beings, a kingdom in which armies clash to help or hinder a supreme conquest, a house where the gods are our guests and which the demons strive to possess; the fullness of its energies and wideness of its being make a seat of sacriﬁce spread, arranged and puriﬁed for a celestial session.  Such are some of the principal images of the Veda and a very brief and insufﬁcient outline of the teaching of the Forefathers.  So understood the Rig Veda ceases to be an obscure, confused and barbarous hymnal; it becomes the high-aspiring Song of Humanity; its chants are episodes of the lyrical epic of the soul in its immortal ascension.


Sri Aurobindo: This at least; what more there may be in the Veda of ancient science, lost knowledge, old psycho-physical tradition remains yet to be discovered.   Hymns to Agni   Agni, the Divine Will-Force T HE NAME of this ﬂaming godhead, Agni, derives from a root whose quality of signiﬁcance is a preeminent force or intensity whether in state, action, sensation or movement; but the qualities of this essential signiﬁcance vary. It means a burning brightness, whence its use for ﬁre; it means movement and especially a curving or serpentine movement; it means strength and force, beauty and splendour, leading and preeminence; it developed also certain emotional values which have perished in Sanskrit, but remain in Greek, angry passion on one side, on the other delight and love.  The Vedic deity Agni is the ﬁrst of the Powers, the pristine and preeminent, that have issued from the vast and secret Godhead. By conscious force of the Godhead the worlds have been created and are governed from within by that hidden and inner Control; Agni is the form, the ﬁre, the forceful heat and ﬂaming will of this Divinity.


Sri Aurobindo: As a ﬂaming Force of knowledge he descends to build up the worlds and seated within them, a secret deity, initiates movement and action. This divine Conscious Force contains all the other godheads in itself as the nave of a wheel contains its spokes. All puissance of action, strength in the being, beauty of form, splendour of light and knowledge, glory and greatness are the manifestation of Agni. And when he is entirely delivered and fulﬁlled out of the envelope of the world’s crookednesses, this deity of ﬂame and force is revealed as the solar godhead of love and harmony and light, Mitra, who leads men towards the Truth.  But in the Vedic cosmos Agni appears ﬁrst as a front of divine Force compact of burning heat and light which forms, assails, enters into, envelops, devours, rebuilds all things in Matter.


Sri Aurobindo: He is no random ﬁre; his is a ﬂame of force instinct with the light of divine knowledge. Agni is the seer-will in the universe unerring   Hymns of the Atris in all its works. Whatever he does in his passion and power is guided by the light of the silent Truth within him. He is a truthconscious soul, a seer, a priest and a worker, — the immortal worker in man. His mission is to purify all that he works upon and to raise up the soul struggling in Nature from obscurity to the light, from the strife and the suffering to love and joy, from the heat and the labour to the peace and the bliss.


Sri Aurobindo: He is, then, the Will, the Knowledge-Force of the Deva; secret inhabitant of Matter and its forms, visible and beloved guest of man, it is he that guards the law of the Truth of things in the apparent aberrations and confusions of the world. The other gods awake with the Dawn, but Agni wakes also in the Night; he keeps his divine vision even in the darkness where there is neither moon nor star; the ﬂame of the divine will and knowledge is visible even in the densest obscurity of inconscient or half-conscient things. The infallible worker is there even when we see nowhere the conscious light of the guiding mind.  No sacriﬁce is possible without Agni. He is at once the ﬂame on the altar and the priest of the oblation.


Sri Aurobindo: When man, awakened from his night, wills to offer his inner and outer activities to the gods of a truer and higher existence and so to arise out of mortality into the far-off immortality, his goal and his desire, it is this ﬂame of upward aspiring Force and Will that he must kindle; into this ﬁre he must cast the sacriﬁce. For it is this that offers to the gods and brings down in return all spiritual riches, — the divine waters, the light, the strength, the rain of heaven.  This calls, this carries the gods to the house of the sacriﬁce. Agni is the priest man puts in front as his spiritual representative (purohita), a Will, a Force greater, higher, more infallible than his own doing for him the works of the sacriﬁce, purifying the materials of the oblation, offering them to the gods whom it has summoned to the divine ritual, determining the right order and season of its works, conducting the progress, the march of the sacriﬁcial development. These and other various functions of the symbolic priesthood, represented in the outward sacriﬁce by different ofﬁciating priests, are discharged by the single Agni.


Sri Aurobindo: Agni is the leader of the sacriﬁce and protects it in the great  Agni, the Divine Will-Force  journey against the powers of darkness. The knowledge and purpose of this divine Puissance can be entirely trusted; he is the friend and lover of the soul and will not betray it to evil gods. Even for the man sitting far off in the night, enveloped by the darkness of the human ignorance, this ﬂame is a light which, when it is perfectly kindled and in proportion as it mounts higher and higher, enlarges itself into the vast light of the Truth. Flaming upward to heaven to meet the divine Dawn, it rises through the vital or nervous mid-world and through our mental skies and enters at last the Paradise of Light, its own supreme home above where joyous for ever in the eternal Truth that is the foundation of the sempiternal Bliss the shining Immortals sit in their celestial sessions and drink the wine of the inﬁnite beatitude.  It is true that here the light is concealed.


Sri Aurobindo: Agni, like other gods, ﬁgures here as a child of the universal parents, Heaven and Earth, Mind and Body, Soul and material Nature. This earth holds him concealed in her own materiality and does not release him for the conscious works of the Father. She hides him in all her growths, her plants, herbs, trees — the forms full of her heats, the objects that keep for the soul its delights. But at last she shall yield him up; she is the lower tinder, the mental being is the upper tinder; by the pressure of the upper on the lower the ﬂame of Agni shall be born. But it is by pressure, by a sort of churning that he is born.


Sri Aurobindo: Therefore he is called the Son of Force.  Even when Agni emerges, he is outwardly obscure in his workings. He becomes, ﬁrst, not a pure Will, though really he is always pure, but a vital Will, the desire of the Life in us, a smoke-obscured ﬂame, son of our crookednesses, a Beast grazing in its pasture, a force of devouring desire that feeds upon earth’s growths, tears and ravages all upon which it feeds and leaves a black and charred line to mark its path where there was the joy and glory of earth’s woodlands. But in all this there is a work of puriﬁcation, which becomes conscious for the man of sacriﬁce.  Agni destroys and puriﬁes.


Sri Aurobindo: His very hunger and desire, inﬁnite in its scope, prepares the establishment of a higher universal order.  The smoke of his passion is overcome and this vital Will, this burning desire in the Life becomes the Steed that carries us up   Hymns of the Atris to the highest levels, — the white Steed that gallops in the front of the Dawns.  Delivered from his smoke-enveloped activity he burns high in our skies, scales the ether of the pure mind and mounts upon the back of heaven. There on that rarer level its god Trita Aptya takes this high-ﬂaming force and forges it into a weapon of sharpness that shall destroy all evil and ignorance. This SeerWill becomes the guardian of the illuminations of knowledge — herds of the Sun that graze in the pastures of life secure from the Sons of division and darkness, protected by the warrior force of the Will that knows.


Sri Aurobindo: He attains the immortality and maintains unhurt its law of truth and joy in the human creature. In the end we overpass all crookednesses of falsehood and error, emerge from the low and broken and devious ground to the straight path and the high and open levels. Will and Knowledge become one; every impulse of the perfected soul becomes conscious of the essential truth of its own self-being, every act fulﬁls it consciently, joyously, victoriously. Such is the godhead to which the Vedic Fire exalts the Aryan who does the sacriﬁce. The Immortal conquers in the mortal and by his sacriﬁce.


Sri Aurobindo: Man, the thinker, ﬁghter, toiler, becomes a seer, self-ruler and king over Nature.  The Veda speaks of this divine Flame in a series of splendid and opulent images. He is the rapturous priest of the sacriﬁce, the God-Will intoxicated with its own delight, the young sage, the sleepless envoy, the ever-wakeful ﬂame in the house, the master of our gated dwelling-place, the beloved guest, the lord in the creature, the seer of the ﬂaming tresses, the divine child, the pure and virgin God, the invincible warrior, the leader on the path who marches in front of the human peoples, the immortal in mortals, the worker established in man by the gods, the unobstructed in knowledge, the inﬁnite in being, the vast and ﬂaming sun of the Truth, the sustainer of the sacriﬁce and discerner of its steps, the divine perception, the light, the vision, the ﬁrm foundation. Throughout the Veda it is in the hymns which celebrate this strong and brilliant deity that we ﬁnd those which are the most splendid in poetic colouring, profound in psychological suggestion and sublime in their mystic intoxication. It is as if his  Agni, the Divine Will-Force  own ﬂame and cry and light had seized with a burning ecstasy on the imagination of his poets.


Sri Aurobindo: Amid this crowd of poetical images there are some of a symbolic character which describe the many births of the divine Flame. They are recounted with an extraordinary variety. Sometimes he is the child of Heaven, the Father — Mind or Soul — and of Earth the Mother — Body or material Nature; sometimes he is the ﬂame born from these two tinders; sometimes Heaven and Earth are called his two mothers, when the ﬁgure is more explicitly symbolic of the pure mental and psychical and the physical consciousness. He is also hymned as the child of the seven Mothers — for his complete birth is a result of the manifestation of seven principles which constitute our conscious existence — three spiritual of the inﬁnite, three temporal of the ﬁnite, and one intermediate — and which are, respectively, the foundation of the seven worlds. Like other gods, he is said to be born of the Truth; the Truth is at once his birthplace and his home.


Sri Aurobindo: Sometimes it is said that the Seven Beloved brought him into birth for the Lord; and here the symbol seems to carry back his source to that other principle of pure Bliss which is the original cause of creation. He has one form of the solar light and ﬂame, another heavenly in the mind, a third which dwells in the rivers. Night and Dawn are delivered of him, the Knowledge and the Ignorance suckle alternately the divine Child in their successive occupation of our heavens. And yet again it is Matarishwan, Master of Life, who has planted him for the gods secret in the growths of earth, secret in her creatures, man, animal and plant, secret in the mighty Waters. These Waters are the seven rivers of the luminous world that descend from heaven when Indra, the God-Mind, has slain the enveloping Python; they descend full of the light and the heavenly abundance, instinct with the clarity and the sweetness, the sweet milk and the butter and the honey.


Sri Aurobindo: Agni’s birth here from these fostering Cows, these Mothers of Plenty, is the greatest of his terrestrial births; fostered by them as the swift Mares of Life he grows at once to his divine greatness, ﬁlls all the planes with his vast and shining limbs and forms their kingdoms in the soul of man into the image of a divine Truth.    Hymns of the Atris  The variety and ﬂexible use of these images — they are sometimes employed in a rapid succession in the same hymn — belongs to a period of conscious symbolism in which the image has not hardened and crystallised into the myth but is constantly a ﬁgure and a parable whose sense still lives and is still plastic in the originating imagination.  The actual legends about Agni, the developed parables as distinct from the less elaborate ﬁgure, are rare or non-existent — in remarkable contrast with the wealth of myth which crowds about the names of Indra and the Ashwins. He participates in the legendary actions of Indra, the Python-slaying, the recovery of the herds, the slaying of the Dasyus; his own activity is universal but in spite of his supreme greatness or perhaps because of it he seeks no separate end and claims no primacy over the other gods.


Sri Aurobindo: He is content to be a worker for man and the helpful deities. He is the doer of the great Aryan work and the pure and sublime mediator between earth and heaven. Disinterested, sleepless, invincible this divine Will-force works in the world as a universal Soul of power housed in all beings, Agni Vaishwanara, the greatest, most powerful, most brilliant and most impersonal of all the cosmic Deities.  The name, Agni, is translated here Power, Strength, Will, the God-will, or the Flame according to the context. The names of the Rishis are also given, wherever necessary, their signiﬁcant value, as in the ﬁrst hymn Gavisthira which means the Steadfast in the Light or the general name Atri.


Sri Aurobindo: Atri means either the Eater or the Traveller; Agni himself is the Atri as he is also the Angiras; out of a devouring desire, experience and enjoyment of the forms of the world he advances to the liberated truth and delight of the soul in the possession of its inﬁnite existence.    The Guardians of the Light SURYA, LIGHT AND SEER  T HE RIG VEDA rises out of the ancient Dawn with the sound of a thousand-voiced hymn lifted from the soul of man to an all-creative Truth and an all-illumining Light.  Truth and Light are synonymous or equivalent words in the thought of the Vedic seers even as are their opposites, Darkness and Ignorance. The battle of the Vedic Gods and Titans is a perpetual conﬂict between Day and Night for the possession of the triple world of heaven, mid-air and earth and for the liberation or bondage of the mind, life and body of the human being, his mortality or his immortality.


Sri Aurobindo: It is waged by the Powers of a supreme Truth and Lords of a supreme Light against other dark Powers who struggle to maintain the foundation of this falsehood in which we dwell and the iron walls of these hundred fortiﬁed cities of the Ignorance.  This antinomy between the Light and the Darkness, the Truth and the Falsehood has its roots in an original cosmic antinomy between the illumined Inﬁnite and the darkened ﬁnite consciousness. Aditi the inﬁnite, the undivided is the mother of the Gods, Diti or Danu, the division, the separative consciousness the mother of the Titans; therefore the gods in man move towards light, inﬁnity and unity, the Titans dwell in their cave of the darkness and issue from it only to break up, make discordant, wounded, limited his knowledge, will, strength, joy and being.  Aditi is originally the pure consciousness of inﬁnite existence one and self-luminous; she is the Light that is Mother of all things.  As the inﬁnite she gives birth to Daksha, the discriminating and distributing Thought of the divine Mind, and is herself born to Daksha as the cosmic inﬁnite, the mystic Cow whose udders feed all the worlds.


Sri Aurobindo: Hymns of the Atris  It is this divine daughter of Daksha who is the mother of the gods. In the cosmos Aditi is the undivided inﬁnite unity of things, free from the duality, advaya, and has Diti the separative dualising consciousness for the obverse side of her cosmic creation, — her sister and a rival wife in the later myth. Here in the lower being where she is manifested as the earth-principle, her husband is the lower or inauspicious Father who is slain by their child Indra, the power of the divine Mind manifested in the inferior creation. Indra, says the hymn, slays his father, dragging him by the feet, and makes his mother a widow.


Sri Aurobindo: In another image, forcible and expressive though repugnant to the decorousness of our modern taste, Surya is said to be the lover of his sister Dawn and the second husband of his mother Aditi, and by a variation of the same image Aditi is hymned as the wife of the all-pervading Vishnu who is in the cosmic creation one of the sons of Aditi and the younger brother of Indra. These images which seem gross and confused when we lack the key to their mystic signiﬁcance, become clear enough the moment that is recovered. Aditi is the inﬁnite consciousness in the cosmos espoused and held by the lower creative power which works through the limited mind and body, but delivered from this subjection by the force of the divine or illumined Mind born of her in the mentality of man. It is this Indra who makes Surya the light of the Truth rise in heaven and dispel the darknesses and falsehoods and limited vision of the separative mentality.  Vishnu is the vaster all-pervading existence which then takes possession of our liberated and uniﬁed consciousness, but he is born in us only after Indra has made his puissant and luminous appearance.


Sri Aurobindo: This Truth is the light, the body of Surya. It is described as the True, the Right, the Vast; as the luminous supramental heaven of Swar — “vast Swar, the great Truth” — concealed beyond our heaven and our earth; and as Surya, the Sun, “that Truth” which dwells lost in the darkness, withheld from us in the secret cave of the subconscient. This hidden Truth is the Vast because it dwells free and manifest only on the supramental plane where existence, will, knowledge, joy move in a rapturous   The Guardians of the Light  and boundless inﬁnity and are not limited and hedged as in this many-walled existence of the mind, life and body which form the lower being. That is the wideness of the higher being to which we have to ascend breaking beyond the two enclosing ﬁrmaments of the mental and physical; it is described as a divine existence free and large in its unbounded range; it is a wideness where there is no obstacle nor any siege of limitation; it is the fear-free pasture of the luminous herds of the Sun; it is the seat and house of the Truth, the own home of the Gods, the solar world, the true light where there is no fear for the soul, no possibility of any wound to the large and equal bliss of its existence.


Sri Aurobindo: This supramental vastness is also the fundamental truth of being, satyam, out of which its active truth wells out naturally and without strife of effort into a perfect and faultless movement because there is upon those heights no division, no gulf between consciousness and force, no divorce of knowledge and will, no disharmonising of our being and its action; everything there is the “straight” and there is no least possibility of crookedness.  Therefore this supramental plane of vastness and true being is also Ritam, the true activity of things; it is a supreme truth of movement, action, manifestation, an infallible truth of will and heart and knowledge, a perfect truth of thought and word and emotion; it is the spontaneous Right, the free Law, the original divine order of things untouched by the falsehoods of the divided and separative consciousness. It is the vast divine and self-luminous synthesis born of a fundamental unity, of which our petty existence is only the poor, partial, broken and perverted cutting up and analysis. Such was the Sun of the Vedic worship, the paradise of light to which the Fathers aspired, the world, the body of Surya son of Aditi.  Aditi is the inﬁnite Light of which the divine world is a formation and the gods, children of the inﬁnite Light, born of her in the Ritam, manifested in that active truth of her movement guard it against Chaos and Ignorance.


Sri Aurobindo: It is they who maintain the invincible workings of the Truth in the universe, they who build its worlds into an image of the Truth. They, bounteous givers, loose out upon man its ﬂoods variously imaged by the mystic poets   Hymns of the Atris as the sevenfold solar waters, the rain of heaven, the streams of the Truth, the seven mighty Ones of heaven, the waters that have knowledge, the ﬂoods that breaking through the control of Vritra the Coverer ascend and overﬂow the mind. They, seers and revealers, make the light of the Truth to arise on the darkened sky of his mentality, ﬁll with its luminous and honey-sweet satisfactions the atmosphere of his vital existence, transform into its vastness and plenitude by the power of the Sun the earth of his physical being, create everywhere the divine Dawn.  Then are established in man the seasons of the Truth, the divine workings, called sometimes the Aryan workings; the law of the Truth seizes and guides his action, the word of the Truth is heard in his thought. Then appear the straight undeviating paths of the Truth, the road and ford of Heaven, the way of going of the gods and of the fathers; for by this path where no violence is done to the divine workings, straight, thornless, happy, easy to tread once our feet are set upon it and the manifested divinities are our guard, the luminous fathers ascended by the power of the Word, by the power of the Wine, by the power of the Sacriﬁce into the fearless light and stood upon the wide and open levels of the supramental existence.


Sri Aurobindo: So must man, their posterity, exchange the crooked movements of the separative consciousness for the straight things of the truth-conscious mind.  For always the courses of the Sun, the gallopings of the divine horse Dadhikravan, the movement of the chariot-wheels of the gods travel on the straight path over wide and level ranges where all is open and the vision is not conﬁned; but the ways of the lower being are crooked windings beset with pits and stumbling-blocks and they crawl unvisited by the divine impulsion over a rugged and uneven ground which screens in from men their goal, their road, their possible helpers, the dangers that await them, their ambushed enemies. Travelling on the path of the Truth with the straight and perfect leading of the gods the limitations of mind and body are at length transcended; we take possession of the three luminous worlds of the higher heaven, enjoy the beatiﬁc immortality, grow into the epiphany of the gods and build in our human existence the universal formations  The Guardians of the Light  of the higher or divine creation. Man then possesses both the divine and the human birth; he is lord of the double movement, he holds Aditi and Diti together, realises the universal in the individual, becomes the Inﬁnite in the ﬁnite.  It is this conception that Surya embodies.


Sri Aurobindo: He is the light of the Truth rising on the human consciousness in the wake of the divine Dawn whom he pursues as a lover follows after his beloved and he treads the paths she has traced for him. For Dawn the daughter of Heaven, the face or power of Aditi, is the constant opening out of the divine light upon the human being; she is the coming of the spiritual riches, a light, a power, a new birth, the pouring out of the golden treasure of heaven into his earthly existence. Surya means the illumined or the luminous, as also the illumined thinker is called s¯uri; but the root means, besides, to create or, more literally, to loose, release, speed forth, — for in the Indian idea creation is a loosing forth of what is held back, a manifestation of what is hidden in the inﬁnite Existence.  Luminous vision and luminous creation are the two functions of Surya. He is Surya the creator and he is Surya the revealing vision, the all-seer.


Sri Aurobindo: What does he create? First the worlds; for everything is created out of the burning light and truth of the inﬁnite Being, loosed out of the body of Surya who is the light of His inﬁnite self-vision, formed by Agni, the seer-will, the omniscient creative force and ﬂaming omnipotence of that self-vision. Secondly, into the night of man’s darkened consciousness this Father of things, this Seer of the truth manifests out of himself in place of the inauspicious and inferior creation, which he then looses away from us, the illimitable harmony of the divine worlds governed by the self-conscious supramental Truth and the living law of the manifested godhead. Still, the name Surya is seldom used when there is question of this creation; it is reserved for his passive aspects as the body of the inﬁnite Light and the revelation. In his active power he is addressed by other names; then he is Savitri, from the same root as Surya, the Creator; or he is Twashtri the Fashioner of things; or he is Pushan, the Increaser, — appellations that are sometimes used as if identical with Surya,   Hymns of the Atris sometimes as if expressing other forms and even other personalities of this universal godhead.


Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, again, manifests himself, especially in the formation of the Truth in man, through four great and active deities Mitra, Varuna, Bhaga and Aryaman, the Lords of pure Wideness, luminous Harmony, divine Enjoyment, exalted Power.  But if Surya is the creator, he who is, as the Veda says, the self of all that moves and all that is stable, and if this Surya is also the divine, “the wide-burning Truth that is lodged in the law which upholds heaven”, then all the worlds should manifest that law of the Truth and all of them should be so many heavens. Whence then comes this falsehood, sin, death, suffering of our mortal existence? We are told that there are eight sons of the cosmic Aditi who are born from her body; by seven she moves to the gods, but the eighth son is Martanda, of the mortal creation, whom she casts away from her; with the seven she moves to the supreme life, the original age of the gods, but Martanda is brought back out of the Inconscient into which he had been cast to preside over mortal birth and death.  This Martanda or eighth Surya is the black or dark, the lost, the hidden sun.


Sri Aurobindo: The Titans have taken and concealed him in their cavern of darkness and thence he must be released into splendour and freedom by the gods and seers through the power of the sacriﬁce. In less ﬁgurative language the mortal life is governed by an oppressed, a hidden, a disguised Truth; just as Agni the divine seer-will works at ﬁrst upon earth concealed or obscured by the smoke of human passion and self-will, so Surya the divine Knowledge lies concealed and unattainable in the night and darkness, is enveloped and contained in the ignorance and error of the ordinary human existence. The Seers by the power of truth in their thoughts discover this Sun lying in the darkness, they liberate this knowledge, this power of undivided and all-embracing vision, this eye of the gods concealed in our subconscient being; they release his radiances, they create the divine Dawn. Indra the divine Mind-power, Agni the Seer-Will, Brihaspati the Master of the inspired word, Soma the immortal Delight born in man aid them to shatter the strong places of the  The Guardians of the Light   mountain


Sri Aurobindo: , the artiﬁcial obstructions of the Titans are broken and this Sun soars up radiant into our heavens. Arisen he mounts to the supramental Truth. “He goes where the gods have made a path for him cleaving like an eagle to his goal”; he ascends with his seven shining horses to the utter luminous ocean of the higher existence; he is led over it by the seers as in a ship. Surya, the Sun, is himself perhaps the golden ship in which Pushan the Increaser leads men beyond evil and darkness and sin to the Truth and the Immortality.  This is the ﬁrst aspect of Surya that he is the supreme Light of the truth attained by the human being after his liberation from the Ignorance.


Sri Aurobindo: “Beholding a higher Light beyond this darkness we have followed it and reached the highest Light of all, Surya divine in the divine Being.” This is the Vedic way of putting the idea which we ﬁnd more openly expressed in the Upanishads, the fairest form of Surya in which man sees everywhere the one Purusha with the liberated vision “He am I.” The higher light of Surya is that by which vision rises on our darkness and moves towards the superconscient, the highest that other greater Truthvision which, having attained, moves in the farthest supreme world of the Inﬁnite.  This brilliant Surya is made by the godward will of man; he is perfectly fashioned by the doers of divine works. For this light is the vision of the highest to which man arrives by the Yajna or Yoga of his being, by its union through a long labour of self-uplifting and self-giving to the powers of the concealed Truth.