वेदों की प्राचीनता एवं काल-निर्णय / ओरायन (लोकमान्य बाल गंगाधर तिलक - खगोलीय वैदिक शोध)

224 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS,
time " signifies the time during which the battle is fought and at
the termination of which Tishtrya comes to the faithful ; and
the passage, therefore, means (1) that the "appointed time," when
Tishtrya was to appear before man after fighting with Apaosha,
varied from one night to a hundred nights, and (2) that Tishtrya
required to be strengthened during the period by Haoma sacri-
fices in which he was to be invoked by his own name. We have
seen above that a hundred nightly Soma sacrifices were offered to
Indra by the ancient Vedic sacrificers to enable him to secure
a victory over Vṛitra, and that Indra was the only deity to whom
the libations were offered in these sacrifices. The legend of
Tishtrya and Apaosha is, therefore, an exact reproduction of
Indra's fight with Vṛitra or Vala ; and with this correspondence
before us, we should feel no hesitation in accepting the view
stated above regarding the origin of the Shata-râtra sacrifice.
Neither Darmesteter nor Spiegel explains why the appointed
time for the appearance of Tishtrya is described as " one night,
or two nights, or fifty, or a hundred nights," though both trans-
late the original in the same way. The legend also forms the
subject of chapter VII of the Bundahish, but there, too, we find no
explanation as to why the appointed time is described as varying
from one to a hundred nights. It is, however, suggested by some
that the appointed time may refer to the season of rains. But
rains cannot be said to come after "one night, two nights, or fifty,
or a hundred nights," and the latter expression would, therefore,
be utterly inappropriate in their case ; nor, as stated above, does
Tishtrya's fight with Apaosha represent only a struggle for rain,
since we know that it is a struggle for light as well. We have also
seen that the existence of night-sacrifices in the Vedic literature,
extending over one, two, three, or ten, or a hundred nights, indi-
cates the long darkness during which Indra fought with Vala ;
and the coincidence between this fact and the 'appointed time,'