The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

Chapter XVIII
The Human Fathers
THESE characteristics of the Angiras Rishis seem at first
sight to indicate that they are in the Vedic system a class
of demigods, in their outward aspect personifications or
rather personalities of the Light and the Voice and the Flame, but
in their inner aspect powers of the Truth who second the gods
in their battles. But even as divine seers, even as sons of Heaven
and heroes of the Lord, these sages represent aspiring humanity.
True, they are originally the sons of the gods, devaputrāh. ,
children of Agni, forms of the manifoldly born Brihaspati, and
in their ascent to the world of the Truth they are described as
ascending back to the place from whence they came; but even
in these characteristics they may well be representative of the
human soul which has itself descended from that world and has
to reascend; for it is in its origin a mental being, son of immortality
(amr.tasya putrah. ), a child of Heaven born in Heaven
and mortal only in the bodies that it assumes. And the part of
the Angiras Rishis in the sacrifice is the human part, to find the
word, to sing the hymn of the soul to the gods, to sustain and
increase the divine Powers by the praise, the sacred food and the
Soma-wine, to bring to birth by their aid the divine Dawn, to
win the luminous forms of the all-radiating Truth and to ascend
to its secret, far and high-seated home.
In this work of the sacrifice they appear in a double form, 1
the divine Angirases, r.s.ayo divyāh. , who symbolise and preside
over certain psychological powers and workings like the gods,
and the human fathers, pitaro manus.yāh. , who like the Ribhus,
also described as human beings or at least human powers that
1 It is to be noted that the Puranas distinguish specifically between two classes of Pitris,
the divine Fathers, a class of deities, and the human Ancestors, to both of whom the
pin. d. a is offered. The Puranas, obviously, only continue in this respect the original Vedic
tradition.