The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

8 The Secret of the Veda
thought of which the historic Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries
were the failing remnants, when the spiritual and psychological
knowledge of the race was concealed, for reasons now difficult
to determine, in a veil of concrete and material figures
and symbols which protected the sense from the profane and
revealed it to the initiated. One of the leading principles of the
mystics was the sacredness and secrecy of self-knowledge and
the true knowledge of the Gods. This wisdom was, they thought,
unfit, perhaps even dangerous to the ordinary human mind or
in any case liable to perversion and misuse and loss of virtue if
revealed to vulgar and unpurified spirits. Hence they favoured
the existence of an outer worship, effective but imperfect, for
the profane, an inner discipline for the initiate, and clothed their
language in words and images which had, equally, a spiritual
sense for the elect, a concrete sense for the mass of ordinary
worshippers. The Vedic hymns were conceived and constructed
on this principle. Their formulas and ceremonies are, overtly, the
details of an outward ritual devised for the Pantheistic Nature-
Worship which was then the common religion, covertly the
sacred words, the effective symbols of a spiritual experience and
knowledge and a psychological discipline of self-culture which
were then the highest achievement of the human race. The ritual
system recognised by Sayana may, in its externalities, stand; the
naturalistic sense discovered by European scholarship may, in
its general conceptions, be accepted; but behind them there is
always the true and still hidden secret of the Veda, — the secret
words, nin. yā vacā ˙msi, which were spoken for the purified in soul
and the awakened in knowledge. To disengage this less obvious
but more important sense by fixing the import of Vedic terms,
the sense of Vedic symbols and the psychological functions of
the Gods is thus a difficult but necessary task, for which these
chapters and the translations that accompany them are only a
preparation.
The hypothesis, if it proves to be valid, will have three advantages.
It will elucidate simply and effectively the parts of the
Upanishads that remain yet unintelligible or ill-understood as
well as much of the origins of the Puranas. It will explain and