Page 96 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

THE ANTELOPE's HEAD 83

from this world. ' • In the later Indian literature we are told that
the souls of the deceased have to cross a streamt before they reach
the region of Yama, while the story of Charon shews that even
the Greeks entertained a similar belief. What could this river be ?
With the vernal equinox in Orion, one can easily identify it with
the Milky Way, which could then have been appropriately described
as separating the regions of gods and Yama, the DevayAna and
the Pit{iyana, or the Northern and the Southern hemisphere. In
the later Hindu works it is actually called the Celestial River ( svar-
1JOdi) while the Greeks have placed near it the constellation of
Argos (ship) and two dogs-Canis Major and· Canis Minor -one
each side to guard both the entrances of the Chinvat Bridge across
it. The ~gveda also mentions two dogs of Yama kept to' watch
the way,' while the Greeks place a three-headed dog ·at the gates
of hell. In ~g. x. 63. 10 we are further told that the land. of the
blessed is to be reached by 'the celestial ship with a good
rudder. ':t The words in the original are daivtm navam. Comparing
these 'J.ith the expression divyasya 8hunah in the Atharva Veda vi.
80. 3, and seeing that a celestial ( divya) representation of Rudra
is described in later works§ it seems to me that we must interpret
the epithet to mean ' celestial ' and not simply ' divine.' Thus
the Vedic works appear to place a celestial dog and a celestial

and Shat, Br. xi. I. S· r. (where the moon is said to be a divine dog)
to prove that the dogs must be understood to mean the sun and the
moon. But I think that the Brlhmat].a here gives simply a conjectural
explanation; and, as in the case of Namuchi's legend, we cannot accept
it, inasmuch as it does not give any reason why the dogs were station-
., ed at the doors of Yama's region. There are many other incidents in
the story which are not eiplained on Bloomfield's theory. I see, there-
fore, no reason for modifying my views which were put down in
writing before I could get Bloomfield's paper in the last number of the
Journal of the Amerian Oriental Society, '
*Dr. Geiger's Civil. of East Iran, Vol. I, p. roo.
t Called Vaitaraoi. The Garu\la. Purl9a; Pretak, vi. 25-3I, states
that a cow should be given to a Brlhmaoa t~ enable the: deceased to
pay the ferrymen on this river.
t See Kaegi's ~lgveda, translated by Arrowsmith, p. 159, note 273.
§ See the passage from the Mahirnna Stotra quoted ;,ifra.