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

PRIMITIVE ARYAN CULTURE AND RELIGION. 437
times, when, expatriated from their mother-land, they settled in
the northern parts of Europe and Central Asia. But the reminis-
cence of the Devayâna as a special period of sacrifices and cere-
monies was tenaciously preserved, and even now it is looked upon as
a season of special religious merit. We can, on this theory, easily
explain why the Gṛihya-Sûtras attach special importance to the
Uttarâyaṇa from a ceremonial point of view, and why death dur-
ing the Dakshiṇâyana is regarded as inauspicious. How the
inter-glacial year of seven or ten months was changed to a
year of twelve months in post-glacial times, and how the equi- .
noctial division which obtained at first on the analogy of the
Devayâna and the Pitṛiyâna, was subsequently altered to the
solstitial one, the old meaning of the word Uttarâyaṇa undergo-
ing (Orion, p. 25 f.) a similar change, are questions, which, though
important in the history of the Aryan calendar, are not relevant
in this place ; and we shall, therefore, proceed with the subject
in hand. It is urged by some writers that though the worship
of natural elements is found to obtain in several ancient Indo-
European religions, yet its beginnings cannot be supposed to go
back to the time of the common origin of the related peoples.
Dr. Schrader has ably refuted this view in the concluding pages
of his book on the pre-historic antiquities of Aryan peoples ;
and the theory of the Arctic home powerfully supports Dr.
Schrader in his conclusions. " If we put aside everything un-
safe and false," observes Dr. Schrader, " that Comparative My-
thology and History of Religion has accumulated on this subject,
we are solely, from the consideration of perfectly trustworthy
material, more and more driven, on all sides, to assume that the
common basis of ancient European religions was a worship of
the powers of Nature practised in the Indo-European period."*
* See Dr. Schrader's Pre His. Antiqui. Ary. Peoples, ..; ;
by Jevons, p. 418.