The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

366 Hymns of the Atris
works, hidden or manifest, the same divine intention and the
same high-reaching labour. Thus an image which to the Vedic
mind was clear, luminous, subtle, profound, striking, comes to
us void of sense or poor and incoherent in sense and therefore
affects us as inflated and pretentious, the ornament of an inapt
and bungling literary craftsmanship.
So too when the seer of the house of Atri cries high to Agni,
“O Agni, O Priest of the offering, loose from us the cords,”
he is using not only a natural, but a richly-laden image. He is
thinking of the triple cord of mind, nerves and body by which
the soul is bound as a victim in the great world-sacrifice, the
sacrifice of the Purusha; he is thinking of the force of the divine
Will already awakened and at work within him, a fiery and
irresistible godhead that shall uplift his oppressed divinity and
cleave asunder the cords of its bondage; he is thinking of the
might of that growing Strength and inner Flame which receiving
all that he has to offer carries it to its own distant and difficult
home, to the high-seated Truth, to the Far, to the Secret, to
the Supreme. All these associations are lost to us; our minds
are obsessed by ideas of a ritual sacrifice and a material cord.
We imagine perhaps the son of Atri bound as a victim in an
ancient barbaric sacrifice, crying to the god of Fire for a physical
deliverance!
A little later the seer sings of the increasing Flame, “Agni
shines wide with vast Light and makes all things manifest by
his greatness.” What are we to understand? Shall we suppose
that the singer released from his bonds, one knows not how, is
admiring tranquilly the great blaze of the sacrificial fire which
was to have devoured him and wonder at the rapid transitions
of the primitive mind? It is only when we discover that the “vast
Light” was a fixed phrase in the language of the Mystics for a
wide, free and luminous consciousness beyond mind, that we
seize the true burden of the Rik. The seer is hymning his release
from the triple cord of mind, nerves and body and the uprising of
the knowledge and will within him to a plane of consciousness
where the real truth of all things transcendent of their apparent
truth becomes at length manifest in a vast illumination.