The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

186 The Secret of the Veda
It is impossible that such expressions should convey nothing
more than the recovery of stolen cows from Dravidian cavedwellers
by some Aryan seers led by a god and his dog or
else the return of the Dawn after the darkness of the night.
The wonders of the Arctic dawn themselves are insufficient to
explain the association of images and the persistent stress on the
idea of the Word, the Thought, the Truth, the journey and the
conquest of the falsehood which meets us always in these hymns.
Only the theory we are enouncing, a theory not brought in from
outside but arising straight from the language and the suggestions
of the hymns themselves, can unite this varied imagery and
bring an easy lucidity and coherence into this apparent tangle
of incongruities. In fact, once the central idea is grasped and the
mentality of the Vedic Rishis and the principle of their symbolism
are understood, no incongruity and no disorder remain. There
is a fixed system of symbols which, except in some of the later
hymns, does not admit of any important variations and in the
light of which the inner sense of the Veda everywhere yields itself
up readily enough. There is indeed a certain restricted freedom in
the combination of the symbols, as in those of any fixed poetical
imagery, — for instance, the sacred poems of the Vaishnavas; but
the substance of thought behind is constant, coherent and does
not vary.