Page 301 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

86 SAMAGRA TILAK - 2 • THE ARCTIC HOME

may either move in a perpendicular plane, like the wheel of' a
chariot, or in a horizontal plane like the potter's wheel. But the
first of these two motions cannot be predicated of the dawn any-
where on the surface of the earth. The light of the morning is,.
everywhere, confined to the horizon, as described in the ~ig-Veda,
VII, 80, 1, which speaks of the dawns as" unrolling the two rajasi,
which border on each other ( samante ), and revealing all things."*·
No dawn, whether in the rigid, the temperate, or the tropical zone
can, therefore, be seen travelling, like the sun, from east to west,
over the head of the observer in a perpendicular plane. The only
possible wheel-like motion is, therefore, along the horizon and.
this can be witnessed only in regions near the Pole. A dawn in the
temperate or the tropical zone is visible only for a short time on
the eastern horizon and is swallowed up, in the same place by the
rays of the rising sun. It is only in the Polar regions that we see
the morning lights revolving along the horizon for some day-long
periods of time, and if the wheel-like motion of the dawn, men-
tioned in III, 61, 3, has any meaning at all, we must take it to refer
to the revolving splendours of the dawn in the Arctic regions pre-
viously described. The expressions " reaching the appointed
place ( ni:jh-kritam) day by day " (I, 123, 9 ), and " wending
ever and ever to the same goal " (III, 61, 3 ) are also ill-suited to
describe the dawn in latitudes below the Arctic circle, but if we take
these expressions to refer to the Polar dawn they become not only
intelligible, but peculiarly appropriate, as such a dawn in its daily
circuits must come to the point from which it started every twenty-
four hours. All these passages taken together, therefore, point
only to one conclusion and that is that both the ~ig-Veda and the
Taittiriya Sarohita describe a long and continuous dawn divided
into thirty dawn-days, or periods of twenty-four hours each, a
characteristic found only in the Polar dawn.
There are a number of other passages where the dawn is
spoken of in the plural, especially in the case of matutinal deities,
who are said to follow or come after not a single dawn, but dawns
in)he plural, ( I, 6, 3; I, 180, 1; V, 76, 1; VII, 9, 1; VII, 63, 3 ). These
passages have been hitherto understood as describing the appe-
arance of the deities after the consecutive dawns of the year. But

i - • ~ig. VII, So, I.~~ ~ii!Bl ~ ~~1 ~f.t NJ\if I
See Wallis, Cosmology of the J,lig-Veda, p. I 16.