Page 315 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

JOO SAMAGRA TILAK .... 2 • THE ARCTIC HOMA

speaks of " thirty steps " traversed by the Dawn, ( Vl, 59, 6 ),
or ()f Dawns going round" thirty yojanas" (I, 123, 8 ); but both
thes.e statements have, as yet, remained totally unexplained, or
have been but imperfectly explained by Indian and Western
scholars alike. But now that we know that the Vedic Dawns were
thirty in number, both the aforesaid statements become at once
easily comprehensible. The only other point necessary to be
decided, so far as the subject in hand is concerned, is whether
these thirty dawns were the dawns of thirty consecutive days, or
whether they formed a '.closely-gathered band ' of thirty con-
tinuous dawns; and on reading the two aforesaid passages from
the Taittiriya Samhita, the one from the Taittinya Brahma~a,
II, 5, 6, 5, and other authorities cited in the foregoing chapter,
I do not think, there can be any doubt that the Goddess of Dawn
worshipped by the Vedic bards, was originally a group of thirty
continuous dawns. It is not contended that the ancestors of the
Vedic bards were unacquainted with ordinary dawns, for, even
in the circum-polar regions there are, during certain parts of
the year, sucessions of ordinary days and nights and with them
of ordinary dawns. But so far as the Vedic Goddess of morning
is concerned, there is enough evidence to shew that it was no other
than the continuous and revolving Dawn at the end of the long
night in those regions, the Dawn that lasted for thirty periods
of 24 hours each, which is possible only within a few degrees
round about the North Pole.