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THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS Being Also a New Key to the Interpretation of Many Vedic Texts and Legends By Lokamanya Bâl Gangâdhar Tilak The proprietor of the Kesari and the Mahratta newspapers, The author of the Orion or Researches into the Antiquity of the Vedas, The Gita Rahasya (a Book on Hindu Philosophy) etc., etc. Publishers Messrs. TILAK BROS Gaikwar Wada Poona City 1903 CONTENTS Chapter Page Preface...................................................... i-ix I Prehistoric Times ............................................... 1 II The Glacial Period ............................................. 19 III The Arctic Regions ............................................ 37 IV The Night of the Gods ....................................... 57 V The Vedic Dawns .............................................. 74 VI Long Day and Long Night .................................. 113 VII Months and Seasons ......................................... 136 VIII The Cows’ Walk ................................................ 173 IX Vedic Myths — The Captive Waters ................. 216 X Vedic Myths — The Matutinal Deities ............... 276 XI The Avestic Evidence ........................................ 328 XII Comparative Mythology ..................................... 364 XIII The Bearing of Our Results on the History of 385 Primitive Aryan Culture and Religion ................ Index ......................................................... 433 i PREFACE The present volume is a sequel to my Orion or Researches into the Antiquity of the Vedas, published in 1893. The estimate of Vedic antiquity then generally current amongst Vedic scholars was based on the assignment of arbitrary period of time to the different strata into which the Vedic literature is divided; and it was believed that the oldest of these strata could not, at the best, be older than 2400 B.C. In my Orion, however, I tried to show that all such estimates, besides being too modest, were vague and uncertain, and that the astronomical statements found in the Vedic literature supplied us with far more reliable data for correctly ascertaining the ages of the different periods of Vedic literature. These astronomical statements, it was further shown, unmistakably pointed out that the Vernal equinox was in the constellation of Mṛiga or Orion (about 4500 B.C.) during the period of the Vedic hymns, and that it had receded to the constellation of the Kṛittikâs, or the Pleiades (about 2500 B.C.) in the days of the Brâhmanas. Naturally enough these results were, at first, received by scholars in a skeptical spirit. But my position was strengthened when it was found that Dr. Jacobi, of Bonn, had independently arrived at the same conclusion, and, soon after, scholars like Prof. Bloomfield, M. Barth, the late Dr. Bulher and others, more or less freely, acknowledged the force of my arguments. Dr. Thibaut, the late Dr. Whitney and a few others were, however, of opinion that the evidence adduced by me was not conclusive. But the subsequent discovery, by my friend the late Mr. S. B. Dixit, of a passage in the Shatapatha Brâhmana, plainly stating that the Kṛittikâs never swerved, in those days, from the due east i.e., the Vernal equinox, has served to dispel all lingering doubts regarding the age of the Brâhmanas; while another Indian astronomer, Mr. V. B. Ketkar, in a recent number of the Journal ii of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, has mathematically worked out the statement in the Taittirîya Brâhmana (III, 1, 1, 5), that Bṛihaspati, or the planet Jupiter, was first discovered when confronting or nearly occulting the star Tishya, and shown that the observation was possible only at about 4650 B.C., thereby remarkably confirming my estimate of the oldest period of Vedic literature. After this, the high antiquity of the oldest Vedic period may, I think, be now taken as fairly established. But if the age of the oldest Vedic period was thus carried back to 4500 B.C., one was still tempted to ask whether we had, in that limit, reached the Ultima Thule of the Aryan antiquity. For, as stated by Prof. Bloomfield, while noticing my Orion in his address on the occasion of the eighteenth anniversary of John Hopkin’s University, “the language and literature of the Vedas is, by no means, so primitive as to place with it the real beginnings of Aryan life.” “These in all probability and in all due moderation,” he rightly observed, “reach back several thousands of years more,” and it was, he said, therefore “needless to point out that this curtain, which seems to shut off our vision at 4500 B.C., may prove in the end a veil of thin gauze.” I myself held the same view, and much of my spare time during the last ten years has been devoted to the search of evidence which would lift up this curtain and reveal to us the long vista of primitive Aryan antiquity. How I first worked on the lines followed up in Orion, how in the light of latest researches in geology and. archeology bearing on the primitive history of man, I was gradually led to a different line of search, and finally how the conclusion, that the ishis lived in an Arctic home in inter-Glacialي ancestors of the Vedic times, was forced on me by the slowly accumulating mass of Vedic and Avestic evidence, is fully narrated in the book, and need not, therefore, be repeated in this place. I desire, however, to take this opportunity of gratefully acknowledging the generous sympathy shown to me at a critical time by that venerable scholar Prof. F. Max Müller, whose recent death was mourned as a personal loss iii by his numerous admirers throughout India. This is not the place where we may, with propriety, discuss the merits of the policy adopted by the Bombay Government in 1897 Suffice it to say that in order to put down certain public excitement, caused by its own famine and plague policy, the Government of the day deemed it prudent to prosecute some Vernacular papers in the province, and prominently amongst them the Kesari, edited by me, for writings which were held to be seditious, and I was awarded eighteen months’ rigorous imprisonment. But political offenders in India are not treated better than ordinary convicts, and had it not been for the sympathy and interest taken by Prof. Max Müller, who knew me only as the author of Orion, and other friends, I should have been deprived of the pleasure, — then the only pleasure, — of following up my studies in these days. Prof. Max Müller was kind enough to send me a copy of ig-Veda, and the Government was pleasedي his second edition of the to allow me the use of these and other books, and also of light to read ,ig-Vedaي for a few hours at night. Some of the passages from the quoted in support, of the Arctic theory in the following pages, were collected during such leisure as I could get in these times. It was mainly through the efforts of Prof. Max Müller, backed by the whole. Indian press, that I was released after twelve months; and in the very first letter I wrote to Prof. Max Müller after my release, I thanked him sincerely for his disinterested kindness, and also gave him a brief summary of my new theory regarding the primitive Aryan home as disclosed by Vedic evidence. It was, of course, not to be expected that a scholar, who had worked all his life on a different line, would accept the new view at once, and that too on reading a bare outline off the evidence in its support. Still it was encouraging to hear from him that though the interpretations of Vedic passages proposed by me were probable, yet my theory appeared to be in conflict with the established geological facts. I wrote in reply that I had already examined the question from that stand-point, and expected soon to place before him the whole evidence in support of my view. But, unfortunately iv I have been deprived of this pleasure by his deeply mourned death which occurred soon after. The first manuscript of the book was written at the end of 1898, and since then I have had the advantage of discussing the question with many scholars in Madras, Calcutta, Lahore, Benares and other places during my travels in the different parts of India. But I hesitated to publish the book for a long time, — a part of the delay is due to other causes, — because the lines of investigation had ramified into many allied sciences such as geology, archeology, comparative mythology and so on; and, as I was a mere layman in these, I felt some diffidence as to whether I had correctly grasped the bearing of the latest researches in these sciences. The difficulty is well described by Prof. Max Müller in his review of the Prehistoric Antiquities of Indo-Europeans, published in the volume of his Last Essays. “The ever-increasing division and sub-division,” observes the learned Professor, “of almost every branch of human knowledge into more special branches of study make the specialist, whether he likes it or not, more and more dependent on the judgment and the help of his fellow-workers. A geologist in our day has often to deal with questions that concern the mineralogist, the chemist, the archeologist, the philologist, nay, the astronomer, rather than the geologist pur et simple, and, as life is too short for all this, nothing is left to him but to appeal to his colleagues for counsel and help. It is one of the great advantages of University life that any one, who is in trouble about some question outside his own domain, can at once get the very best information from his colleagues, and many of the happiest views and brightest solutions of complicated problems are due, as is well-known, to this free intercourse, this scientific give and take in our academic centers.” And again, “Unless a student can appeal for help to recognized authorities on all these subjects, he is apt to make brilliant discoveries, which explode at the slightest touch of the specialist, and, on the other hand, to pass by facts which have only to be pointed out in order to disclose their significance and far- reaching importance.

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