Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 1, 2025
Its contents were composed while the Aryans dwelt upon the Indus, and while they were on their way to the neighborhood of the Ganges. The Rig-Veda, therefore, exhibits this people in their earliest stage of religious and social development.
Since the day when Grimm laid the foundations of the science of mythology, all this has been changed. It is now held that Achilleus and Paris and Helena are to be found, not only in the Iliad, but also in the Rig-Veda, and therefore, as mythical conceptions, date, not from Homer, but from a period preceding the dispersion of the Aryan nations.
So, perhaps, in this manvantara of the pre-classical Sanskrit literature, the Rig-Veda with its hymns represents the first, the Chaucerian period; but a Golden Age Chaucerian, simple and pure, a time in which the Mysteries really ruled human life, and when to hymn the Gods was to participate in the wonder and freeddom of their being.
He pursues the even tenour of his way in utter disregard of Grimm, and Kuhn, and Breal, and Dasent, and Burnouf. He takes no note of the Rig-Veda, nor does he seem to realize that there was ever a time when the ancestors of the Greeks and Hindus worshipped the same gods. Two or three times he cites Max Muller, but makes no use of the copious data which might be gathered from him.
He tells the unseemly tale, and asks why the Earth goddess became a mare? Then he gives the analogous myth from the Rig-Veda, which, as it stands, is 'quite unintelligible. But Yaska explains that Saranyu, daughter of Tvashtri, in the form of a mare, had twins by Vivasvat, in the shape of a stallion.
And in spite of the strong opposition to this cult manifested in Indian literature, beginning with the Rig-Veda, and ripening to fruition in the Upanishads, in spite of the rise of Buddhism, with its opposing dictum of renunciation, the 'Life-Cult' asserted its essential vitality against all opposition, and under modified forms represents the 'popular' religion of India to this day.
There at the beginning Narada says, 'I know the Rig-veda, the Yajur-veda, the Sama-veda, the Atharvana as the fourth, the Itihasa- purana as the fifth, and so on, enumerating all the various branches of knowledge, and finally summing up 'with all this I know the mantras only, I do not know the Self. Now this declaration of the knowledge of the Self not being attainable through any branch of knowledge except the knowledge of the Bhuman evidently has no other purpose but to glorify this latter knowledge, which is about to be expounded.
While having no connection with the main subject of our study, the Grail legend, I should like to draw the attention of students of Medieval literature to the curious parallel between the Rig-Veda poem of the Medicine Man or Krauter-Lied as it is also called, and Rusteboeuf's Dist de l'Erberie.
I must here be allowed to quote a hymn in the Rig-Veda, which was historically earlier than the primitive philosophy of Greece, but which reveals the same tendency, the same mythical and scientific teaching in its interpretation of the world. "Nor Aught nor Nought existed; yon bright sky Was not, nor heaven's broad woof outstretched above. What covered all? what sheltered? what concealed?
We must first note that a very considerable number of the Rig-Veda hymns depend for their initial inspiration on the actual bodily needs and requirements of a mainly agricultural population, i.e., of a people that depend upon the fruits of the earth for their subsistence, and to whom the regular and ordered sequence of the processes of Nature was a vital necessity.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking