Savitri

  VII

The Vedic Storehouse of Myth

India's (and the world's) most ancient literature, the Veda luxuriates in myths and legends; there are gods, energies, primal forces, assaults, sacrifices, victories; and scholars have tried to interpret this ancient body of poetry from various angles—philological, ritualistic, naturalistic, allegorical, ethical, symbolical. In his important study, The Secret of the Veda, Sri Aurobindo has tackled the problem afresh and his main conclusions are these:

The hypothesis I propose is that the Rig-Veda is itself the one

considerable document that remains to us from the early period

of human thought of which the historic Eleusinian and Orphic

mysteries were the failing remnants when the spiritual and

psychological knowledge of the race was concealed, for reasons

now difficult to determine, in a veil of concrete and material figures

and symbols which protected the sense from the profane and

revealed it to the initiated... Hence they favoured the existence of

an outer worship, effective but imperfect, for the profane, an inner

discipline for the initiate, and clothed their language in words

and images which had, equally, a spiritual sense for the elect, a

concrete sense for the mass of ordinary worshippers...²⁸

The central conception of the Veda is the conquest of the Truth

out of the darkness of Ignorance and by the conquest of the Truth

the conquest also of Immortality... ²⁹

Knowledge itself was a traveling and a reaching, or a finding and

a winning; the revelation came only at the end, the light was the

prize of a final victory.³⁰

 The Vedic myths, then, and the legends in which they are enshrined, have as a general rule both an exoteric sense and an esoteric significance; central to the Vedic scheme is the conception of the

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struggle between Darkness and Light, and the ultimate conquest of Light, which is Truth, which is also Immortality; and the conquest involves a travelling, a pursuit, a reaching, a winning. The celebrated chant in the Brihadaranyaka—

      Lead me from the unreal to the real!

      Lead me from darkness to light!

      Lead me from death to immortality!

splendorously crystallises this inner spiritual drama of conflict, pursuit and victory. Yet it is not always possible, it is not always wise, for average humanity to plunge straight into the conflict; the full blaze of the Truth may sometimes have a blinding effect; and therefore some preparation, initiation, is called for. The myth-making power could be such a mediator/initiator. In Savitri describing 'The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind', Sri Aurobindo writes:

      Thus worked the Power upon the growing world;

      Its subtle craft withheld the full-orbed blaze,

      Cherished the soul's childhood and on fictions fed

      Far richer in their sweet and nectarous sap

      Nourishing its immature divinity

      Than the staple or dry straw or Reason's tilth,

      Its heaped fodder of innumerable facts,

      Plebian fare on which today we thrive.³¹

Knowledge of the divine life, spiritual knowledge, is best insinuated through myths and the key symbols that constitute them rather than through logic or philosophy. "Only a mythology", says Berdyaev, "which conceives of the divine celestial life as a celestial history and as a drama of love and freedom unfolding itself between God and His other self, which He loves and for whose reciprocal love He thirsts, and only an admission of God's longing for His other self, can provide a solution of celestial history and, through it, of the destinies of both man and the world."³² There is, for example, the symbol of the Hound of Heaven, which Francis Thompson has

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turned into a wonderful poem. In the Rig Veda, there are references to Sarama and the Sarameya, her two dogs; some pursuit is implied and the 'quarry' is hunted down at last. But what is the esoteric meaning? The object of the pursuit is to reach the wideness of the cows; and the cow is really the symbol of the divine reality. Thus the symbolism of Sarama and her dogs really conveys the idea of the true nature of a spiritual quest:

Whether Sarama figures as the fair-footed goddess speeding on

the path or the heavenly hound, mother of these wide-ranging

guardians of the path, the idea is the same, a power of the Truth

that seeks and discovers, that finds by a divine faculty of insight

the hidden Light and the denied Immortality. But it is to this

seeking and finding that her function is limited.³³

Such symbols, then, are the heart and soul of the myths, which are themselves the heart and soul of the great legends that treasure the deepest memories of the human race. Seemingly irrational and unscientific, myths and symbols are attempts to open the gateways of Reality, and if a philosopher like Plato himself made pregnant use of them, it was because he realised that it is, "the only type of language in which the world of 'becoming' can be expressed at all."³⁴

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