The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

56 The Secret of the Veda
mind only the food given at the sacrifice to the gods, but for the
initiated it meant the Ananda, the joy of the divine bliss entering
into the physical consciousness and at the same time suggested
the image of the Soma-wine, at once the food of the gods and
the Vedic symbol of the Ananda.
We see everywhere this use of language dominating the
Word of the Vedic hymns. It was the great device by which
the ancient Mystics overcame the difficulty of their task. Agni
for the ordinary worshipper may have meant simply the god of
the Vedic fire, or it may have meant the principle of Heat and
Light in physical Nature, or to the most ignorant it may have
meant simply a superhuman personage, one of the many “givers
of wealth”, satisfiers of human desire. How suggest to those
capable of a deeper conception the psychological functions of
the God? The word itself fulfilled that service. For Agni meant
the Strong, it meant the Bright, or even Force, Brilliance. So
it could easily recall to the initiated, wherever it occurred, the
idea of the illumined Energy which builds up the worlds and
which exalts man to the Highest, the doer of the great work, the
Purohit of the human sacrifice.
Or how keep it in the mind of the hearer that all these
gods are personalities of the one universal Deva? The names of
the gods in their very meaning recall that they are only epithets,
significant names, descriptions, not personal appellations. Mitra
is the Deva as the Lord of love and harmony, Bhaga as the
Lord of enjoyment, Surya as the Lord of illumination, Varuna
as the all-pervading Vastness and purity of the Divine supporting
and perfecting the world. “The Existent is One,” says the Rishi
Dirghatamas, “but the sages express It variously; they say Indra,
Varuna, Mitra, Agni; they call It Agni, Yama, Matarishwan.”
The initiate in the earlier days of the Vedic knowledge had no
need of this express statement. The names of the gods carried to
him their own significance and recalled the great fundamental
truth which remained with him always.
But in the later ages the very device used by the Rishis
turned against the preservation of the knowledge. For language
changed its character, rejected its earlier pliability, shed off old