The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

112 The Secret of the Veda
madhu´scutah. and speaks of the Gods enjoying in them the intoxication
of the energy, ūrja ˙m madanti; from this we can gather
that the honey or sweetness is the madhu, the Soma, the wine
of the Ananda, of which the Gods have the ecstasy. But in the
forty-seventh hymn he makes his meaning unmistakably clear.
“O Waters, that supreme wave of yours, the drink of Indra,
which the seekers of the Godhead have made for themselves,
that pure, inviolate, clarity-streaming, honeyed (ghr.taprus.a ˙m
madhumantam) wave of you may we today enjoy. O Waters,
may the son of the waters (Agni), he of the swift rushings, foster
that most honeyed wave of you; that wave of yours in which
Indra with the Vasus is intoxicated with ecstasy, may we who
seek the Godhead taste today. Strained through the hundred
purifiers, ecstatic by their self-nature, they are divine and move
to the goal of the movement of the Gods (the supreme ocean);
they limit not the workings of Indra: offer to the rivers a food
of oblation full of the clarity (ghr.tavat). May the rivers which
the sun has formed by his rays, from whom Indra clove out a
moving wave, establish for us the supreme good. And do ye, O
gods, protect us ever by states of felicity.”
Here we have Vamadeva’s madhumān ūrmih. , the sweet
intoxicating wave, and it is plainly said that this honey, this
sweetness is the Soma, the drink of Indra. That is farther made
clear by the epithet ´satapavitrāh. which can only refer in the
Vedic language to the Soma; and let us note that it is an epithet
of the rivers themselves and that the honeyed wave is brought
flowing from them by Indra, its passage being cloven out on
the mountains by the thunderbolt that slew Vritra. Again it is
made clear that these waters are the seven rivers released by
Indra from the hold of Vritra, the Besieger, the Coverer and sent
flowing down upon the earth.
What can these rivers be whose wave is full of Soma wine,
full of the ghr.ta, fullofūrj, the energy? What are these waters
that flow to the goal of the gods’ movement, that establish for
man the supreme good? Not the rivers of the Punjab; no wildest
assumption of barbarous confusion or insane incoherence in
the mentality of the Vedic Rishis can induce us to put such a