CHAPTER XVI The Angirasa Rishis THE name Angirasa occurs in the Veda in two different forms, Angira and Angirasa, although the latter is the more common; we have also the patronymic Angirasa applied more than once to the god Brihaspati. In later times Angirasa, like Bhrigu and other seers, was regarded as one of the original sages, progenitors of clans of Rishis who went by their names, the Angirasas, Atris, Bhargavas. In the Veda also there are these families of Rishis, the Atris, Bhrigus, Kanwas, etc. In one of the hymns of the Atris the discovery of Agni, the sacred fire, is attributed to the Angirasa Rishis (V.I 1.6), but in another to the Bhrigus (X.46.9).¹

THE GOD OF THE MYSTIC WINE* I IX.42 Giving birth to the luminous worlds of heaven,¹giving birth to the Sun in the waters,² the Brilliant One clothes himself with the waters and the rays.³ He by the ancient thought flows pressed out in a stream, a god around the gods. For one increasing and swiftly advancing4 there flow for his winning of the plenty the Soma-juices with their thousand strengths. Milked out, the ancient food, he is poured into the strainer that purifies and shouting he brings to birth the gods. ¹The

X THE ASHWINS, LORDS OF BLISS Rig-veda IV.45 Lo, that Light is rising up and the all-pervading car is being yoked on the high level of this Heaven; there are placed satisfying delights in their triple pairs and the fourth skin of honey overflows. Full of honey upward rise the delight; upward horses and cars in the wide-shinings of the Dawn and they roll aside the veil of darkness that encompassed on every side and they extend the lower world into a shining form like that of the luminous heaven. Drink of the honey with your honey-drinking mouths, for the honey yoke your car

VII TO BHAGA SAVITRI, THE ENJOYER Rig-veda V.82 Of Savitri divine we embrace that enjoying, that which is the best, rightly disposes all, reaches the goal, even Bhaga's, we hold by the thought. For of him no pleasure in things can they diminish, for too self-victorious is it, nor the self-empire of this Enjoyer. 'Tis he that sends forth the delights on the giver, the god who is the bringer forth of things; that varied richness of his enjoyment we seek. Today, O divine Producer, send forth on us fruitful felicity, dismiss what belongs to the evil dream

CHAPTER XXI The Sons of Darkness WE HAVE seen, not once but repeatedly, that it is impossible to read into the story of the Angirasas, Indra and Sarama, the cave of the Panis and the conquest of the Dawn, the Sun and the Cows an account of a political and military struggle between Aryan invaders and Dravidian cave-dwellers. It is a struggle between the seekers of Light and the powers of Darkness; the cows are the illuminations of the Sun and the Dawn, they cannot be physical cows; the wide fear-free field of the Cows won by Indra for the Aryans is the wide world of Swar, the world of the solar Illumination, the threefold luminous regions of Heaven. Therefore

THE THIRD HYMN TO MITRA-VARUNA V.64 THE LEADERS TO THE BLISSFUL HOME [The Rishi invokes the Lords of the infinite wideness and harmony whose arms embrace the soul's highest plane of the Truth and Bliss, to extend to him those arms of awakened consciousness and knowledge, so that he may have their all-embracing delight. He aspires by the path of Mitra to the joy of his harmonies in which there is no wound nor hurt; conceiving and holding the highest by the power of the illumining word, he would aspire to an increase in that plane, the proper home of the gods. Let the two great gods create in his being that wide world of their divine strength

THE SECRET OF THE VEDA CHAPTER I The Problem and Its Solution Is there at all or is there still a secret of the Veda? According to current conceptions the heart of that ancient mystery has been plucked out and revealed to the gaze of all, or rather no real secret ever existed. The hymns of the Veda are the sacrificial compositions of a primitive and still barbarous race written around a system of ceremonial and propitiatory rites, addressed to personified Powers of Nature and replete with a confused mass of half-formed myth and crude astronomical allegories yet in the making. Only in the later hymns do we perceive the first app

THE THIRD HYMN TO AGNI THE DIVINE FORCE, CONQUEROR OF THE SUPREME GOOD [The Divine Will-Force is that of which all the other godheads are forms and 'he manifests all these powers of supreme Truth as he grows in us. Thus the supreme state of conscious being is attained and by that our complex and manifold existence is maintained in the Light and the Joy. The Rishi prays that the evil may not be allowed to express itself again in him, that the secret soul in us who is the Father of things but in us appears as the child of our works and our evolution, may open itself to the vast Truth-Consciousness. The Divine Flame will destroy all the powers of falsehood an

THE ELEVENTH HYMN TO MITRA-VARUNA V.72 AN INVOCATION TO THE SACRIFICE [The Rishi invokes Mitra and Varuna to the sacrifice as the godheads who lead man on the path according to the law of the truth and confirm our spiritual gains by its workings.] With the words we sacrifice to Mitra and to Varuna as the Atri. Sit on the seat of the largeness for the drinking of the wine. By your working you keep firm the gettings of good and you make men to walk the path by your law. Sit on the seat of the largeness for the drinking of the wine. May Mitra and Varuna take delight in

THE TWENTY-EIGHTH HYMN TO AGNI A HYMN OF THE HIGH-BLAZING FLAME, KING OF IMMORTALITY [The Rishi celebrates the flame of the Will high-blazing in the dawn of knowledge as the King of Immortality, the giver to the soul of its spiritual riches and felicity and of a well-governed mastery of Nature. He is the bearer of our oblation, the illumined guide of our sacrifice to its divine and universal goal.] The Flame of Will burning high rises to his pure light in the heaven of mind; wide he extends his illumination and fronts the Dawn. She comes, moving upward, laden with all desirable things, seeking the gods with the oblation, luminous with the