Page 366 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

MONTHS AND SEASONS 151

Thus we now use coins for exchange, yet the word 'pecuniary •
which is derived from pec~lS = cattle, is still retained in the language;
and similarly, we still speak of the rising of the sun, though we
now know that it is not the luminary that rises, but the earth, by
rotating round its axis, makes the sun visible to us. Very much in
the same way and by the same process, expres ions like saptashva
( seven horsed) or sapta-chakra (seven-wheeled, ), as applied to
the year or the sun, must have become recognised and established
as current phrases in the language before the hymns assumed their
present form, and the Vedic bards could not have discarded them
even when they knew that they were not applicable to the state of
things before them. On the contrary, as we find in the Brahmap.as
every artifice, that ingenuity could suggest, was tried to make these
old phrases harmonise with the state of things then in vogue, and
from the religious or the sacrificial point of view it was quite neces-
sary to do so. But when we have w examine the question from a
historical stand-point, it is our duty to separate the relics of the
older period from facts or incidents of the later period with which
the former are sometimes inevitably mixed up; and if we analyse
the verse in question (I, 164, 12) in this way we shall clearly see in
it the traces of a year of ten months and five seasons. The same
principle is also applicable in other cases, as, for instance, when we
find the Navagvas mentioned together with the seven vfpras in VI,
22, 2. The bards, who gave us the present version of the hymns,
knew of the older or primeval state of things only by traditions,
and it is no wonder if these traditions are occasionally mixed up
with later events. On the contrary the preservation of so many
traditions of the primeval home is itself a wonder, and it is this
fact, which invests the oldest Veda with such peculiar importance
from the religious as well as the historical point of view.
To sum up there are clear traditions preserved in the ~ig-Veda,
which show that the year once consisted of seven months or seven
suns, as in the legend of Aditi's sons, or that there were ten months
of the year as in the legend of the Dashagavs or Dirghatamas;
and these cannot be accounted for except on the Arctic theory.
These ten months formed the sacrificial session of the primeval
sacrificers of the Aryan race and the period was denominated as
manu~hd yugd or human ages, an expression much misunderstood
by Western scholars. The sun went below the horizon jn the tenth
of these yugas and Indra fought with Vala in the period of darkness