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

PRIMITIVE ARYAN CULTURE AND RELIGION. 433
advocates of the Central Asian as well as of the northern
European home of the Aryans are both unwilling to carry back
the beginning of the Aryan civilisation beyond post-glacial times,
and we are told that Aryan mythology and religion cannot,
therefore, claim any higher antiquity.
All such guesses and speculations about the origin of the
Aryan race and its civilization will have now to be revised in
the new light thrown upon the subject by the theory of the
Arctic home in pre-Glacial times. We cannot now maintain
that primitive Aryans were a post-Glacial race, or that they
advanced from barbarism to civilisation in the Neolithic period
either in Central Asia or in the northern parts of Europe; nor
is it possible to argue that because the mythologies of the differ-
ent branches of the Aryan race do not disclose the existence
of common deities, these mythologies must be taken to have
developed after the separation of the Aryan races from their
common home. Thus, for instance, we are told that though
the word Uṣhas occurs in Zend as Ushangh, and may be com-
pared to Greek Eos, Latin Aurora, Lithuanian Auszra, Teutonic
Austrô and Anglo-Saxon Eostra, yet it is only in the Vedic
mythology that we find Uṣhas raised to the dignity of the
goddess of the morning; and from this we are asked to infer
that the worship of the dawn was developed only on the
Indian soil. The theory of the Arctic home, however, makes
it impossible to argue in this way. If Vedic dieties are
clothed with attributes which are unmistakably polar in their
origin,—and in the case of Uṣhas, the polar character has been
shown to be unquestionable,—we cannot hold that the legends
pertaining to these deities were developed on the plains of
Central Asia. It was impossible for the Indian priests to
conceive or picture the splendours of the dawn in the way
we meet with in the Ṛig-Veda; for it has been shown that
the evanescent dawn, with which they were familiar, is quite
dissimilar in character to the Arctic dawn, the subject of the
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