The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

The Cow and the Angiras Legend 139
this is a means towards the opening up of the other worlds, the
winning of Swar, the ascent to the solar heavens, the attainment
by the path of the Truth to the Light and to the heavenly Bliss
where the mortal arrives at Immortality.
Such is the undoubted substance of the Veda. The ritual
and mythological sense which has been given to it from very
ancient times is well known and need not be particularised; in
sum, it is the performance of sacrificial worship as the chief
duty of man with a view to the enjoyment of wealth here and
heaven hereafter. We know also the modern view of the matter in
which the Veda is a worship of the personified sun, moon, stars,
dawn, wind, rain, fire, sky, rivers and other deities of Nature, the
propitiation of these gods by sacrifice, the winning and holding
of wealth in this life, chiefly from human and Dravidian enemies
and against hostile demons and mortal plunderers, and
after death man’s attainment to the Paradise of the gods. We
now find, that however valid these ideas may have been for
the vulgar, they were not the inner sense of the Veda to the
seers, the illumined minds (kavi, vipra) of the Vedic age. For
them these material objects were symbols of the immaterial; the
cows were the radiances or illuminations of a divine Dawn, the
horses and chariots were symbols of force and movement, gold
was light, the shining wealth of a divine Sun — the true light,
r.ta ˙m jyotih. ; both the wealth acquired by the sacrifice and the
sacrifice itself in all their details symbolised man’s effort and his
means towards a greater end, the acquisition of immortality. The
aspiration of the Vedic seer was the enrichment and expansion
of man’s being, the birth and the formation of the godheads in
his life-sacrifice, the increase of the Force, Truth, Light, Joy of
which they are the powers until through the enlarged and everopening
worlds of his being the soul of man rises, sees the divine
doors (devīr dvārah. ) swing open to his call and enters into the
supreme felicity of a divine existence beyond heaven and earth.
This ascent is the parable of the Angiras Rishis.
All the gods are conquerors and givers of the Cow, the Horse
and the divine riches, but it is especially the great deity Indra
who is the hero and fighter in this warfare and who wins for man