Book Description

A study of the way of writing of the Vedic mystics, their philosophic system, their system of symbols and the truths they figure, and translations of selected hymns of the Rig-Veda. Is there at all or is there still a secret of the Veda? Sri Aurobindo asks in the opening sentence of this book. He examines the ritualistic and naturalistic theory of nineteenth-century European scholars and then sets forth his own view: The hypothesis I propose is that the Rig-veda is itself the one considerable document that remains to us from the early period of human thought of which the historic Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries were the failing remnants, when the spiritual and psychological knowledge of the race was concealed, for reasons now difficult to determine, in a veil of concrete and material figures and symbols which protected the sense from the profane and revealed it to the initiated... To disengage this less obvious but more important sense [of the Vedic ritual system] by fixing the import of Vedic terms, the sense of Vedic symbols and the psychological functions of the Gods is thus a difficult but necessary task, for which these chapters and the translations that accompany them are only a preparation. Contents: The Problem and its Solution: A Retrospect of Vedic Theory; Modern Theories; The Philological Method of the Veda; Agni and the Truth; The Victory of the Fathers; The Conquest over the Dasyus; Selected Hymns; Hymns of the Atris; The Origins of Aryan Speech . Subjects: Indology, Philosophy