J. Hertel claims that in India and Iran alike we find the conception of the heaven as a great stone building, filled with light, through whose doors, the sun and the stars, the light of heaven shines upon men. For this view is adduced the reference in the Rigveda to the palace of Varuna with a thousand doors, which is asserted to be none other than the heaven with its stars. For Iran there is the narrative in Vendidad ii, which has long passed as the Iranian version of the legend of the flood, but in which we should rather see the account of Yama’s reign in the golden age and of the way in which he conveyed the first to die through the opening of the heaven, i.e. the sun, into the heaven of light. It is, however, true that this original legend of the Magian faith has been altered in the form in which we have it, since it could not, as it stood, be made consistent with the Zoroastrian doctrine of the fate of the dead. The Vara mentioned in the Vendidad is to be compared with the Vedic Vala,8 which is none other than the closed firmament which the lord of the heaven of light, Brhaspati, or sometimes Indra, cleaves in order to set free the ruddy kine, i.e. the stars. Yet a further confirmation of the new interpretation of the Vendidad is seen in an obscure verse of the Rigveda, which is made to yield the sense that Manu adorned with flames the door of the heaven of Indra. By yet another conjecture we are to see in Rigveda x. 14. 2 (Yama as the
1 E. Mogk (Die Menschenopfer der Germanen, Leipzig, 1909) thus explains the origin
of German human sacrifices. See also F. Schwenn, Die Menschenopfer bei den Griechen und Romern; Reid, JHS. ii. 34 ff. Cf. Preuss, Globus, lxxxvi. 108 ff.; Frazer, The Dying God; Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, v. 167 ff.; W. Weber, Archiv f. Religionswissenschaft, xix.
4
9
333 ff.; Wissowa, xxii. 201 ff. (expul-
sion of evil).
Cf. Helm, Altgerm. Rel. i. 51.
Op. cit., pp. 388 f.
5 xviii. 8. 13.
• i. 83. 5.
Die Ilimmelstore im Veda und im Avesta
(1924).
• Contrast above, Chap. 9, § 1. viii. 63. 1.
622
Appendix C
first hath found this way to the heaven for us, and this pastureland none can take from us’) the sole allusion to a legend of the gradual failure of the earth to support the number of those alive and the departure of Yama with the superfluous population, involving the introduction of death into the world. It is clearly impossible to accept this evidence as establishing the doctrine enunciated. That in one passage1 Varuna’s palace with a thousand doors should be spoken of, is not the slightest proof that the Vedic Indian normally regarded the firmament as a building filled with light, whose doors were the sun and the stars, and the rendering of Rigveda viii. 63. 1, which ascribes to Manu the making of flames in the heaven of Indra, is clearly impossible; 2 even on Hertel’s hypothesis, all that Manu could naturally be said to do would be to enter by a flaming door, not to create it, and in fact the term dhiyaḥ here used refers clearly to devotion and not to flames. The version of Vala is wholly implausible, while the interpretation of the Vendidad passage is accomplished merely by the process of inventing a meaning and explaining away everything which contradicts it by the theory of adaption to Zoroastrian ideas. Peculiarly gratuitous is the interpretation of Rigveda x. 14. 2, which has not the slightest reference to an overburdened earth, but merely to the winning of an abode which knows no ending in the sky. The whole doctrine that Yama removed the surplus population to the heaven because the earth was overcrowded is un-"
-Vedic, and even the epic 3 knows it not. For the Veda we have merely the aetiological legends of the expansion of the earth from a small nucleus, often by the action of a cosmic boar, and the wholly unconnected and late legend of the sinking of the earth in the ocean because the evil-minded ViŚvakarman, son of Bhuvana, sought to bestow it upon the priest KaŚyapa, though no mortal had the right to do so.5
6
There is, therefore, no ground to hold that the term aŚmānam svaryam in Rigveda, v. 56. 4, with the derivative v. 30. 8. refers to the firmament of stone which the Maruts cause to move. Quite different is vii. 86. 1, which ascribes to Varuna the motion of the lofty vault of heaven, that is the starry firmament, for that passage says nothing of the firmament as a building of stone. Wholly irrelevant also are passages in the Upanisads and later which treat of the sun as a stage on the way to the highest place; this is not the view of the Rigveda which expressly prays that those who despise Vedic practices (apavrata) may be debarred from the sun itself, doubtless as the abode of the holy, not as the way to it; Hertel himself recognizes that in ix. 113. 8 the pious man desires to win immortality in the place where is the closure of the sky, i.e. the sun. When in the Upanisads the moon appears as the door of the world of heaven, nothing whatever is said to suggest that this refers to an opening through which the waters of heaven are poured forth; clearly the reference is to the old idea that the souls of the dead go to the moon to dwell there, as the text in question expressly lays down. When the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa says that the rain springs from the moon and enters back into it, it says nothing of water from the heaven. Varuna’s connexion with rain is sufficiently natural without deriving it from the fact that the firmament is his
9
1 vii. 88. 5. Cf. Sraośa’s palace in Yasna,
Ivii. 21.
2 RV. x. 68. 11, cited as parallel, deals with the souls of the dead as stars, not as making holes in the sky; cf. AV. xviii. 2. 47.
MBh. iii. 142. 35 ff.; xii. 255. 15 ff.
4 MS. i. 6. 3; KS. viii. 2; TB. i. 1, 3.5-7: CB. xiv. 1. 2. 11. For other legends of
7
the expansion of the earth (pṛthivi, the broad), see PB. xx. 14. 5; TS. ii. 1. 2. 3. AB. viii. 21; CB. i. 7. 1. 14 ff. BAU. v. 10. 1; CU.viii. 6. 2; Mund. i.
- 5, &c.
v. 12.9.
“KU. i. 2.
9 viii. 28.
The Aryan Conception of the Heaven
623
palace, and that the ocean of the heaven is connected with the fire of heaven. Still less plausible is the treatment of Bṛhaspati as merely lord of the fireheaven, who, therefore, can send down rain, or the assertion that the ruddy kine which he sets free are the stars who send rain, and that this conception of them is only explicable on the theory that they are doors to the fiery heaven.
1
Final arguments for the view of Hertel are based on a new interpretation of the Tiśtrya legend as revealing the production of rain through the overflowing of the celestial ocean Vourukaśa through the stars as the openings in the firmament, and on the view that the divine doors invoked in the Apri hymns are really the sun, moon, and stars; it is sufficient to note his admission that this view was already unknown to the author of Rigveda x. 70. 5, and to add that this ignorance was fully justified by the incredible nature of the theory.”