India: What can it teach us? Part 18

2. "He cuts the trees asunder, he kills evil spirits; the whole world trembles before his mighty weapon. Even the guiltless flees before the powerful, when Par_g_anya thundering strikes down the evil-doers.

3. "Like a charioteer, striking his horses with a whip, he puts forths his messenger of rain. From afar arise the roarings of the lion, when Par_g_anya makes the sky full of rain.

4. "The winds blow, the lightnings[240] fly, plants spring up, the sky pours. Food is produced for the whole world, when Par_g_anya blesses the earth with his seed.

5. "O Par_g_anya, thou at whose work the earth bows down, thou at whose work hoofed animals are scattered, thou at whose work the plants a.s.sume all forms, grant thou to us thy great protection!

6. "O, Maruts, give us the rain of heaven, make the streams of the strong horse run down! And come thou hither with thy thunder, pouring out water, for thou (O Par_g_anya) art the living G.o.d, thou art our father.

7. "Do thou roar, and thunder, and give fruitfulness! Fly around us with thy chariot full of water! Draw forth thy water-skin, when it has been opened and turned downward, and let the high and the low places become level!

8. "Draw up the large bucket, and pour it out; let the streams pour forth freely! Soak heaven and earth with fatness! and let there be a good draught for the cows!

9. "O Par_g_anya, when roaring and thundering thou killest the evil-doers, then everything rejoices, whatever lives on earth.

10. "Thou hast sent rain, stop now! Thou hast made the deserts pa.s.sable, thou hast made plants grow for food, and thou hast obtained praise from men."

This is a Vedic hymn, and a very fair specimen of what these ancient hymns are. There is nothing very grand and poetical about them, and yet, I say, take thousands and thousands of people living in our villages, and depending on rain for their very life, and not many of them will be able to compose such a prayer for rain, even though three thousand years have pa.s.sed over our heads since Par_g_anya was first invoked in India. Nor are these verses entirely without poetical conceptions and descriptions. Whoever has watched a real thunderstorm in a hot climate will recognize the truth of those quick sentences: "the winds blow, the lightnings fly, plants spring up, the hoofed cattle are scattered." Nor is the idea without a certain drastic reality, that Par_g_anya draws a bucket of water from his well in heaven, and pours out skin after skin (in which water was then carried) down upon the earth.

There is even a moral sentiment perceptible in this hymn. "When the storms roar, and the lightnings flash and the rain pours down, even the guiltless trembles, and evil-doers are struck down." Here we clearly see that the poet did not look upon the storm simply as an outbreak of the violence of nature, but that he had a presentiment of a higher will and power which even the guiltless fears; for who, he seems to say, is entirely free from guilt?

If now we ask again, Who is Par_g_anya? or What is Par_g_anya? we can answer that par_g_anya was meant originally for the cloud, so far as it gives rain; but as soon as the idea of a giver arose, the visible cloud became the outward appearance only, or the body of that giver, and the giver himself was somewhere else, we know not where. In some verses Par_g_anya seems to step into the place of Dyaus, the sky, and P_ri_thivi, the earth, is his wife. In other places,[241] however, he is the son of Dyaus or the sky, though no thought is given in that early stage to the fact that thus Par_g_anya might seem to be the husband of his mother. We saw that even the idea of Indra being the father of his own father did not startle the ancient poets beyond an exclamation that it was a very wonderful thing indeed.

Sometimes Par_g_anya does the work of Indra,[242] the Jupiter Pluvius of the Veda; sometimes of Vayu, the wind, sometimes of Soma, the giver of rain. Yet with all this he is not Dyaus, nor Indra, nor the Maruts, nor Vayu, nor Soma. He stands by himself, a separate person, a separate G.o.d, as we should say--nay, one of the oldest of all the Aryan G.o.ds.

His name, par_g_anya, is derived from a root par_g_, which, like its parallel forms pars and parsh, must (I think) have had the meaning of sprinkling, irrigating, moistening. An interchange between final _g_, _s_, and sh, may, no doubt, seem unusual, but it is not without parallel in Sanskrit. We have, for instance, the roots pi_ng_, pingere; pish, to rub; pi_s_, to adorn (as in pe_s_as, p???????, etc.); m_rig_, to rub, m_ri_sh, to rub out, to forget; m_ris_, mulcere.

This very root m_rig_ forms its participle as m_ri_sh-_t_a, like ya_g_, ish_t_a, and vi_s_, vish_t_a; nay there are roots, such as druh, which optionally take a final lingual or guttural, such as dhru_t_ and dhruk.[243]

We may therefore compare par_g_ in par_g_anya with such words as p_ri_shata, p_ri_shati, speckled, drop of water;[244] also par_s_u, cloud, p_ris_ni, speckled, cloud, earth; and in Greek p???(?), pe?????, etc.[245]

If derived from par_g_, to sprinkle, Par_g_anya would have meant originally "he who irrigates or gives rain."[246]

When the different members of the Aryan family dispersed, they might all of them, Hindus as well as Greeks and Celts, and Teutons and Slaves, have carried that name for cloud with them. But you know that it happened very often that out of the commonwealth of their ancient language, one and the same word was preserved, as the case might be, not by all, but by only six, or five, or four, or three, or two, or even by one only of the seven princ.i.p.al heirs; and yet, as we know that there was no historical contact between them, after they had once parted from each other, long before the beginning of what we call history, the fact that two of the Aryan languages have preserved the same finished word with the same finished meaning, is proof sufficient that it belonged to the most ancient treasure of Aryan thought.

Now there is no trace, at least no very clear trace, of Par_g_anya, in Greek, or Latin, or Celtic, or even in Teutonic. In Slavonic, too, we look in vain, till we come to that almost forgotten side-branch called the _Lettic_, comprising the spoken _Lituanian_ and _Lettish_, and the now extinct _Old Prussian_. Lituania is no longer an independent state, but it was once, not more than six centuries ago, a Grand Duchy, independent both of Russia and Poland. Its first Grand Duke was Ringold, who ruled from 1235, and his successors made successful conquests against the Russians. In 1368 these grand dukes became kings of Poland, and in 1569 the two countries were united. When Poland was divided between Russia and Prussia, part of Lituania fell to the former, part to the latter. There are still about one million and a half of people who speak Lituanian in Russia and Prussia, while Lettish is spoken by about one million in Curland and Livonia.

The Lituanian language even as it is now spoken by the common people, contains some extremely primitive grammatical forms--in some cases almost identical with Sanskrit. These forms are all the more curious, because they are but few in number, and the rest of the language has suffered much from the wear and tear of centuries.

Now in that remote Lituanian language we find that our old friend Par_g_anya has taken refuge. There he lives to the present day, while even in India he is almost forgotten, at least in the spoken languages; and there, in Lituania, not many centuries back might be heard among a Christianized or nearly Christianized people, prayers for rain, not very different from that which I translated to you from the Rig-Veda. In Lituanian the G.o.d of thunder was called _Perkunas_,[247] and the same word is still used in the sense of thunder. In Old Prussian, thunder was _percunos_, and in Lettish to the present day _perkons_ is thunder, G.o.d of thunder.[248]

It was, I believe, Grimm who for the first time identified the Vedic Par_g_anya with the Old Slavonic Perun, the Polish Piorun, the Bohemian Peraun. These words had formerly been derived by Dobrovsky and others from the root peru, I strike. Grimm ("Teutonic Mythology,"

Engl. transl., p. 171) showed that the fuller forms Perkunas, Pehrkons, and Perkunos existed in Lituanian, Lettish, Old Prussian, and that even the Mordvinians had adopted the name Porguini as that of their thunder-G.o.d.

Simon Grunau, who finished his chronicle in 1521, speaks of three G.o.ds, as wors.h.i.+pped by the Old Prussians, Patollo, Patrimpo, and Perkuno, and he states that Perkuno was invoked "for storm's sake, that they might have rain and fair weather at the proper time, and thunder and lightning should not injure them."[249]

The following Lituanian prayer has been preserved to us by Lasitzki:[250]

"Check thyself, O Percuna, and do not send misfortune on my field! and I shall give thee this flitch."

Among the neighbors of the Lets, the Esthonians, who, though un-Aryan in language, have evidently learned much from their Aryan neighbors, the following prayer was heard,[251] addressed by an old peasant to their G.o.d _Picker_ or _Picken_, the G.o.d of thunder and rain, as late as the seventeenth century.[252]

"Dear Thunder (woda Picker), we offer to thee an ox that has two horns and four cloven hoofs; we would pray thee for our ploughing and sowing, that our straw be copper-red, our grain golden-yellow. Push elsewhere all the thick black clouds, over great fens, high forests, and wildernesses. But unto us, ploughers and sowers, give a fruitful season and sweet rain. Holy Thunder (poha Picken), guard our seed-field, that it bear good straw below, good ears above, and good grain within."[253]

Now, I say again, I do not wish you to admire this primitive poetry, primitive, whether it is repeated in the Esthonian fens in the seventeenth century of our era, or sung in the valley of the Indus in the seventeenth century before our era. Let aesthetic critics say what they like about these uncouth poems. I only ask you, Is it not worth a great many poems, to have established this fact, that the same G.o.d Par_g_anya, the G.o.d of clouds and thunder and lightning and rain, who was invoked in India a thousand years before India was discovered by Alexander, should have been remembered and believed in by Lituanian peasants on the frontier between East Prussia and Russia, not more than two hundred years ago, and should have retained its old name Par_g_anya, which in Sanskrit meant "showering," under the form of _Perkuna_, which in Lituanian is a name and a name only, without any etymological meaning at all; nay, should live on, as some scholars a.s.sure us, in an abbreviated form in most Slavonic dialects, namely, in Old Slavonic as _Perun_, in Polish as _Piorun_, in Bohemian as _Peraun_, all meaning thunder or thunderstorm?[254]

Such facts strike me as if we saw the blood suddenly beginning to flow again through the veins of old mummies; or as if the Egyptian statues of black granite were suddenly to begin to speak again. Touched by the rays of modern science the old words--call them mummies or statues--begin indeed to live again, the old names of G.o.ds and heroes begin indeed to speak again.

All that is old becomes new, all that is new becomes old, and that one word, Par_g_anya, seems, like a charm, to open before our eyes the cave or cottage in which the fathers of the Aryan race, our own fathers--whether we live on the Baltic or on the Indian Ocean--are seen gathered together, taking refuge from the buckets of Par_g_anya, and saying, "Stop now, Par_g_anya; thou hast sent rain; thou hast made the deserts pa.s.sable, and hast made the plants to grow; and thou hast obtained praise from man."

We have still to consider the third cla.s.s of G.o.ds, in addition to the G.o.ds of the earth and the sky, namely the G.o.ds of the highest heaven, more serene in their character than the active and fighting G.o.ds of the air and the clouds, and more remote from the eyes of man, and therefore more mysterious in the exercise of their power than the G.o.ds of the earth or the air.

The princ.i.p.al deity is here no doubt the bright sky itself, the old _Dyaus_, wors.h.i.+pped as we know by the Aryans before they broke up into separate people and languages, and surviving in Greece as Zeus, in Italy as Jupiter, Heaven-father, and among the Teutonic tribes as _Tyr_ and _Tiu_. In the Veda we saw him chiefly invoked in connection with the earth, as Dyava-p_ri_thivi, Heaven and Earth. He is invoked by himself also, but he is a vanis.h.i.+ng G.o.d, and his place is taken in most of the Vedic poems by the younger and more active G.o.d, _Indra_.

Another representative of the highest heaven, as covering, embracing, and s.h.i.+elding all things, is Varu_n_a, a name derived from the root var, to cover, and identical with the Greek _Ouranos_. This G.o.d is one of the most interesting creations of the Hindu mind, because though we can still perceive the physical background from which he rises, the vast, starry, brilliant expanse above, his features, more than those of any of the Vedic G.o.ds, have become completely transfigured, and he stands before us as a G.o.d who watches over the world, punishes the evil-doer, and even forgives the sins of those who implore his pardon.

I shall read you one of the hymns addressed to him:[255]

"Let us be blessed in thy service, O Varu_n_a, for we always think of thee and praise thee, greeting thee day by day, like the fires lighted on the altar, at the approach of the rich dawns." 2.

"O Varu_n_a, our guide, let us stand in thy keeping, thou who art rich in heroes and praised far and wide! And you, unconquered sons of Aditi, deign to accept us as your friends, O G.o.ds!" 3.

"aditya, the ruler, sent forth these rivers; they follow the law of Varu_n_a. They tire not, they cease not; like birds they fly quickly everywhere." 4.

"Take from me my sin, like a fetter, and we shall increase, O Varu_n_a, the spring of thy law. Let not the thread be cut while I weave my song! Let not the form of the workman break before the time! 5.

"Take far away from me this terror, O Varu_n_a; Thou, O righteous king, have mercy on me! Like as a rope from a calf, remove from me my sin; for away from thee I am not master even of the twinkling of an eye." 6.

"Do not strike us, Varu_n_a, with weapons which at thy will hurt the evil-doer. Let us not go where the light has vanished! Scatter our enemies, that we may live." 7.

"We did formerly, O Varu_n_a, and do now, and shall in future also, sing praises to thee, O mighty one! For on thee, unconquerable hero, rest all statutes, immovable, as if established on a rock." 8.

"Move far away from me all self-committed guilt, and may I not, O king, suffer for what others have committed! Many dawns have not yet dawned; grant us to live in them, O Varu_n_a." 9.

You may have observed that in several verses of this hymn Varu_n_a was called aditya, or son of Aditi. Now Aditi means _infinitude_, from _dita_, bound, and _a_, not, that is, not bound, not limited, absolute, infinite. Aditi itself is now and then invoked in the Veda, as the Beyond, as what is beyond the earth and the sky, and the sun and the dawn--a most surprising conception in that early period of religious thought. More frequently, however, than Aditi, we meet with the adityas, literally the sons of Aditi, or the G.o.ds beyond the visible earth and sky--in one sense, the infinite G.o.ds. One of them is Varu_n_a, others Mitra and Aryaman (Bhaga, Daksha, A_ms_a), most of them abstract names, though pointing to heaven and the solar light of heaven as their first, though almost forgotten source.

When Mitra and Varu_n_a are invoked together, we can still perceive dimly that they were meant originally for day and night, light and darkness. But in their more personal and so to say dramatic aspect, day and night appear in the Vedic mythology as the two A_s_vins, the two hors.e.m.e.n.

Aditi, too, the infinite, still shows a few traces of her being originally connected with the boundless Dawn; but again, in her more personal and dramatic character, the Dawn is praised by the Vedic poets as Ushas, the Greek Eos, the beautiful maid of the morning, loved by the A_s_vins, loved by the sun, but vanis.h.i.+ng before him at the very moment when he tries to embrace her with his golden rays. The sun himself, whom we saw reflected several times before in some of the divine personifications of the air and the sky and even of the earth, appears once more in his full personality, as the sun of the sky, under the names of Surya (Helios), Savit_ri_, Pushan, and Vish_n_u, and many more.

You see from all this how great a mistake it would be to attempt to reduce the whole of Aryan mythology to solar concepts, and to solar concepts only. We have seen how largely the earth, the air, and the sky have each contributed their share to the earliest religious and mythological treasury of the Vedic Aryans. Nevertheless, the Sun occupied in that ancient collection of Aryan thought, which we call Mythology, the same central and commanding position which, under different names, it still holds in our own thoughts.

What we call the Morning, the ancient Aryans called the Sun or the Dawn; "and there is no solemnity so deep to a rightly-thinking creature as that of the Dawn." (These are not my words, but the words of one of our greatest poets, one of the truest wors.h.i.+ppers of Nature--John Ruskin.) What we call Noon, and Evening, and Night, what we call Spring and Winter, what we call Year, and Time, and Life, and Eternity--all this the ancient Aryans called _Sun_. And yet wise people wonder and say, How curious that the ancient Aryans should have had so many solar myths. Why, every time we say "Good-morning," we commit a solar myth. Every poet who sings about "the May driving the Winter from the field again" commits a solar myth. Every "Christmas number" of our newspapers--ringing out the old year and ringing in the new--is brimful of solar myths. Be not afraid of solar myths, but whenever in ancient mythology you meet with a name that, according to the strictest phonetic rules (for this is a _sine qua non_), can be traced back to a word meaning sun, or dawn, or morning, or night, or spring or winter, accept it for what it was meant to be, and do not be greatly surprised, if a story told of a solar eponymos was originally a solar myth.

No one has more strongly protested against the extravagances of comparative mythologists in changing everything into solar legends, than I have; but if I read some of the arguments brought forward against this new science, I confess they remind me of nothing so much as of the arguments brought forward, centuries ago, against the existence of Antipodes! People then appealed to what is called Common Sense, which ought to teach everybody that Antipodes could not possibly exist, because they would tumble off. The best answer that astronomers could give, was, "Go and see." And I can give no better answer to those learned skeptics who try to ridicule the Science of Comparative Mythology--"Go and see!" that is, go and read the Veda, and before you have finished the first Ma_nd_ala, I can promise you, you will no longer shake your wise heads at solar myths, whether in India, or in Greece, or in Italy, or even in England, where we see so little of the sun, and talk all the more about the weather--that is, about a solar myth.