The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

188 The Secret of the Veda
have conquered immortality by the work, have attained the goal
and are invoked to assist a later mortal race in the same divine
achievement. Quite apart from the later Yama hymns of the tenth
Mandala in which the Angirases are spoken of as Barhishad
Pitris along with the Bhrigus and Atharvans and receive their
own peculiar portion in the sacrifice, they are in the rest of the
Veda also called upon in a less definite but a larger and more
significant imagery. It is for the great human journey that they
are invoked; for it is the human journey from the mortality to the
immortality, from the falsehood to the truth that the Ancestors
accomplished, opening the way to their descendants.
We see this characteristic of their working in VII.42 and
VII.52. The first of these two hymns of Vasishtha is a Sukta
in which the gods are invoked precisely for this great journey,
adhvara yajña, 2 the sacrifice that travels or is a travel to the
home of the godheads and at the same time a battle: for thus
it is sung, “Easy of travelling for thee is the path, O Agni, and
known to thee from of old. Yoke in the Soma-offering thy ruddy
(or, actively-moving) mares which bear the hero. Seated, I call
the births divine” (verse 2). What path is this? It is the path
between the home of the gods and our earthly mortality down
which the gods descend through the antariks.a, the vital regions,
to the earthly sacrifice and up which the sacrifice and man by
the sacrifice ascends to the home of the gods. Agni yokes his
mares, his variously-coloured energies or flames of the divine
Force he represents, which bear the Hero, the battling power
within us that performs the journey. And the births divine are at
once the gods themselves and those manifestations of the divine
life in man which are the Vedic meaning of the godheads. That
this is the sense becomes clear from the fourth Rik. “When the
2 Sayana takes a-dhvara yajña, the unhurt sacrifice; but “unhurt” can never have come
to be used as a synonym of sacrifice. Adhvara is “travelling”, “moving”, connected with
adhvan, a path or journey from the lost root adh, to move, extend, be wide, compact,
etc. We see the connection between the two words adhvan and adhvara in adhva,air,sky
and adhvara with the same sense. The passages in the Veda are numerous in which the
adhvara or adhvara yajña is connected with the idea of travelling, journeying, advancing
on the path.