The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

160 The Secret of the Veda
of heaven and heroes or powers of the Asura, the mighty Lord,
divas putrāso asurasya vīrāh. (III.53.7), an expression which,
their number being seven, reminds us strongly, though perhaps
only fortuitously, of the seven Angels of Ahura Mazda in the kindred
Iranian mythology. Moreover there are passages in which
they seem to become purely symbolical, powers and sons of Agni
the original Angiras, forces of the symbolic Light and Flame,
and even to coalesce into a single seven-mouthed Angiras with
his nine and his ten rays of the Light, navagve a ˙ngire da´sagve
saptāsye, on and by whom the Dawn breaks out with all her
joy and opulence. And yet all these three presentations seem to
be of the same Angirases, their characteristics and their action
being otherwise identical.
Two entirely opposite explanations can be given of the double
character of these seers, divine and human. They may have
been originally human sages deified by their descendants and in
the apotheosis given a divine parentage and a divine function; or
they may have been originally demigods, powers of the Light and
Flame, who became humanised as the fathers of the race and the
discoverers of its wisdom. Both of these processes are recognisable
in early mythology. In the Greek legend, for instance, Castor
and Polydeuces and their sister Helen are human beings, though
children of Zeus, and only deified after their death, but the probability
is that originally all three were gods, — Castor and Polydeuces,
the twins, riders of the horse, saviours of sailors on the
ocean being almost certainly identical with the Vedic Ashwins,
the Horsemen, as their name signifies, riders in the wonderful
chariot, twins also, saviours of Bhujyu from the ocean, ferriers
over the great waters, brothers of the Dawn, and Helen very
possibly the Dawn their sister or even identical with Sarama,
the hound of heaven, who is, like Dakshina, a power, almost a
figure of the Dawn. But in either case there has been a farther
development by which these gods or demigods have become invested
with psychological functions, perhaps by the same process
which in the Greek religion converted Athene, the Dawn, into
the goddess of knowledge and Apollo, the sun, into the divine
singer and seer, lord of the prophetic and poetic inspiration.