CHAPTER
XI
The Seven Rivers
THE Veda speaks constantly of the waters
or the rivers, especially of the divine waters, āpo devīḥ or āpo
divyāḥ,
and occasionally of the waters which carry in them the
light of the luminous solar world or the light of the Sun, svarvatīr
apaḥ. The
passage of the waters effected by the gods or by man
with the aid of the gods is a constant symbol. The three great
conquests to which the human being aspires, which the gods are
in constant battle with the Vritras and Panis to give to man are
the herds, the waters and the Sun or the solar world, gāḥ, apaḥ,
svaḥ. The
question is whether these references are to the rains
of heaven, the rivers of Northern India possessed or assailed
by the Dravidians — the Vritras being sometimes the Dravidians and sometimes
their gods, the herds possessed or robbed
from the Aryan settlers by the indigenous "robbers", — the
Panis who hold or steal the herds being again sometimes the
Dravidians and sometimes their gods; or is there a deeper, a
spiritual meaning? Is the winning of Swar simply the recovery
of the sun from its shadowing by the storm-cloud or its seizure
by eclipse or its concealment by the darkness of Night? For here
at least there can be no withholding of the sun from the Aryans
by human "black-skinned" and "noseless" enemies. Or does
the
conquest of Swar mean simply the winning of heaven by sacrifice? And in either
case what is the sense of this curious collocation of cows, waters and the sun
or cows, waters and the sky?
Is it not rather a system of symbolic meanings in which the
herds, indicated by the word gāḥ. in the sense both of cows and
rays of light, are the illuminations from the higher consciousness
which have their origin in the Sun of Light, the Sun of Truth?
Is not Swar itself the world or plane of immortality governed by
that Light or Truth of the all-illumining Sun called in Veda the
vast Truth, ṛtam
brạhat, and
the true Light ? and are not the divine
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waters, āpo devīḥ, divyāḥ or svarvatīḥ, the floods of this higher
consciousness pouring on the mortal mind from that plane of
immortality?
It is, no doubt, easy to point to passages or hymns in which
on the surface there seems to be no need of any such interpretation and the
Sukta can be understood as a prayer or praise for
the giving of rain or an account of a battle on the rivers of the
Punjab. But the Veda cannot be interpreted by separate passages
or hymns. If it is to have any coherent or consistent meaning, we
must interpret it as a whole. We may escape our difficulties by
assigning to svar or gāḥ entirely different senses in different passages—just as
Sayana sometimes finds in gāḥ the sense of
cows, sometimes rays and sometimes, with an admirable light-heartedness,
compels it to mean waters.¹ But such a system of
interpretation is not rational merely because it leads to a
"rationalistic" or "common-sense" result. It rather flouts
both reason
and common sense. We can indeed arrive by it at any result
we please, but no reasonable and unbiassed mind can feel convinced that that
result was the original sense of the Vedic
hymns.
But if we adopt a more consistent method, insuperable difficulties oppose
themselves to the purely material sense. We have
for instance a hymn (VII.49) of Vasishtha to the divine waters, āpo devīḥ,
āpo divyāḥ,
in which the second verse runs "The divine
waters that flow whether in channels dug or self-born, they
whose movement is towards the ocean, pure, purifying, — may
those waters foster me." Here, it will be said, the sense is quite
clear; it is to material waters, earthly rivers, canals,—or, if
the word khanitrimāḥ
means simply "dug", then wells, — that
Vasishtha addresses his hymn and divyāḥ, divine, is only an ornamental
epithet of praise; or even perhaps we may render the
verse differently and suppose that three kinds of water are
described, — the waters of heaven, that is to say the rain, the
water of wells, the water of rivers. But when we study the hymn
as a whole this sense can no longer stand. For thus it runs:
¹So
also he interprets the all-important Vedic word ṛtam sometimes as sacrifice, sometimes as truth, sometimes
as water, and all these different senses in a single hymn of five or
six verses!
"May those divine waters foster me, the eldest (or greatest)
of the ocean from the midst of the moving flood that go purifying, not settling
down, which Indra of the thunderbolt, the Bull,
clove out. The divine waters that flow whether in channels dug
or self-born, whose movement is towards the Ocean, — may
those divine waters foster me. In the midst of whom King
Varuna moves looking down on the truth and the falsehood of
creatures, they that stream honey and are pure and purifying,
— may those divine waters foster me. In whom Varuna the king,
in whom Soma, in whom all the Gods have the intoxication of
the energy, into whom Agni Vaishwanara has entered, may those
divine waters foster me." (VII.49.1-4)
It is evident that Vasishtha is speaking here of the same
waters, the same streams that Vamadeva hymns, the waters that
rise from the ocean and flow into the ocean, the honeyed wave
that rises upward from the sea, from the flood that is the heart
of things, streams of the clarity, ghṛtasya dhārāḥ. They are the
floods of the supreme and universal conscious existence in which
Varuna moves looking down on the truth and the falsehood of
mortals, — a phrase that can apply neither to the descending
rains nor to the physical ocean. Varuna in the Veda is not an
Indian Neptune, neither is he precisely, as the European scholars
at first imagined, the Greek Ouranos, the sky. He is the master
of an ethereal wideness, an upper ocean, of the vastness of being,
of its purity; in that vastness, it is elsewhere said, he has made
paths in the pathless infinite along which Surya, the Sun, the
Lord of Truth and the Light can move. Thence he looks down
on the mingled truths and falsehoods of the mortal conscious-
ness.... And we have further to note that these divine waters are
those which Indra has cloven out and made to flow upon the
earth — a description which throughout the Veda is applied to
the seven rivers.
If there were any doubt whether these waters of Vasishtha's
prayer are the same as the waters of Vamadeva's great hymn, madhumān ūrmiḥ,
ghṛtasya
dhārāḥ,
it is entirely removed by another Sukta of the sage Vasishtha (VII.47). In the
forty-ninth
hymn he refers briefly to the divine waters as honey-streaming,
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madhuścutaḥ
and speaks of the Gods enjoying in them the intoxication of the energy,
ūrjam
madanti; from this we can gather
that the honey or sweetness is the madhu, the Soma, the wine of
the Ananda, of which the Gods have the ecstasy. But in the fortyseventh hymn he makes his meaning unmistakably clear.
"O Waters, that supreme wave of yours, the drink of Indra,
which the seekers of the Godhead have made for themselves,
that pure, inviolate, clarity-streaming, most honeyed (ghṛtapruṣam madhumantam) wave of you may we
today enjoy. O
Waters, may the son of the waters (Agni), he of the swift rushings,
foster that most honeyed wave of you; that wave of yours in
which Indra with the Vasus is intoxicated with ecstasy, may we
who seek the Godhead taste today. Strained through the hundred purifiers,
ecstatic by their self-nature, they are divine and
move to the goal of the movement of the Gods (the supreme
ocean); they limit not the workings of Indra: offer to the rivers a
food of oblation full of the clarity (ghṛtavat). May the rivers
which the sun has formed by his rays, from whom Indra clove
out a moving wave, establish for us the supreme good. And do
ye, O Gods, protect us ever by states of felicity." (VII.47.1-4)
Here we have Vamadeva's
madhumān ūrmiḥ, the sweet intoxicating wave,
and it is plainly said that this honey, this sweetness is the Soma, the drink
of Indra. That is farther made clear by
the epithet śatapavitrāḥ which can only refer in the Vedic language
to the Soma; and let us note that it is an epithet of the rivers
themselves and that the honeyed wave is brought flowing from
them by Indra, its passage being cloven out on the mountains by
the thunderbolt that slew Vritra. Again it is made clear that these
waters are the seven rivers released by Indra from the hold of
Vritra, the Besieger, the Coverer and sent flowing down upon the
earth.
What can these rivers be whose wave is full of Soma-wine,
full of the ghṛta,
full of ūrj, the energy ? What are these waters
that flow to the goal of the god's movement, that establish for
man the supreme good ? Not the rivers of the
Punjab; no
wildest
assumption of barbarous confusion or insane incoherence in the
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mentality of the Vedic Rishis can induce us to put such a construction upon
such expressions. Obviously these are the waters
of the Truth and the Bliss that flow from the supreme ocean.
These rivers flow not upon earth, but in heaven; they are pre-
vented by Vritra the Besieger, the Coverer from flowing down
upon the earth-consciousness in which we mortals live till Indra,
the god-mind, smites the Coverer with his flashing lightnings and
cuts out a passage on the summits of that earth-consciousness
down which they can flow. Such is the only rational, coherent
and sensible explanation of the thought and language of the
Vedic sages. For the rest, Vasishtha makes it clear enough to us; for he says that these are the waters which Surya has formed by
his rays and which, unlike earthly movements, do not limit or
diminish the workings of Indra, the supreme Mind. They are, in
other words, the waters of the Vast Truth, ṛtam bṛhat and, as we
have always seen that this Truth creates the Bliss, so here we
find that these waters of the Truth, ṛtasya dhārāḥ, as they are
plainly called in other hymns (e.g. V.12.2 "O perceiver of the
Truth, perceive the Truth alone, cleave out many streams of the
Truth"), establish for men the supreme good and the supreme
good¹ is the felicity, the bliss of the divine existence.
Still, neither in these hymns nor in Vamadeva's is there an
express mention of the seven rivers. We will turn therefore to
the first hymn of Vishwamitra, his hymn to Agni (III.l), from its
second to its fourteenth verse. The passage is a long one, but is
sufficiently important to cite and translate in full.
Prāñcam yajñam cakṛma vardhatām gīḥ,
samidbhir agnim namasā duvasyan;
divaḥ śaśāsur
vidathā kavīnām,
gṛtsāya
cit tavase gātum īṣuḥ.
(2)
Mayo dadhe medhiraḥ
pūtadakṣo
divaḥ
subandhur januṣā
pṛthivyāḥ;
avindan nu darśatam apsvantar
devāso agnim apasi svasṛṇām.
(3)
¹The
word indeed is usually understood as "felicity".
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Avardhayanta subhagarh sapta yahvīḥ,
śvetam jajñānam aruṣam mahitvā;
śiśum na jātam abhyārur aśvā
devāso agnim janiman vapuṣyan. (4)
Śukrebhir angai raja ātatanvān,
kratum punānaḥ kavibhiḥ. pavitraḥ);
śocir vasānaḥ pari āyur apām,
śriyo mimiīe bṛhatīr anūnāḥ. (5)
Vavrāja sīm anadatīr adabdhāḥ,
divo yahvīr avasānā anagnāḥ;
śanā atra
yuvatayaḥ sayonīr
ekam garbham dadhire sapta vāṇīḥ.
(6)
Stīrṇā asya samhato viśvarūpā
ghṛtasya yonau sravathe madhūnām;
asthur atra dhenavaḥ
pinvamānā
mahī dasmasya mātarā samīcī. (7)
Babhrāṇaḥ sūno sahaso vyadyaud,
dadhānaḥ śukrā
rabhasā vapūmṣi;
ścotanti dhārā madhuno ghṛtasya,
vṛṣā yatra vāvṛdhe kāvyena. (8)
Pituś cid ūdhar januṣā viveda,
vyasya dhārā aṣrjad vi dhenāḥ;
guhā carantam sakhibhiḥ śivebhir
divo yahvībhir na guhā babhūva. (9)
Pituś ca garbham janituś ca babhre,
pūrvīr eko adhayat pīpyānāḥ;
vṛṣṇe sapatnī śucaye sabandhū,
ubhe asmai manuṣye
ni pāhi. (10)
Urau mahān anibādhe vavardha,
āpo agnim yaśasaḥ sam hi pūrvīḥ;
ṛtasya yonāvaśayad
damūnā
jāminām agnir apasi svasṛṇām.
(11)
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Akro na babhriḥ samithe mahīnām,
didṛkṣeyaḥ sūnave bhāṛjīkaḥ;
ud usriyā janitā yo jajāna,
apām garbho nṛtamo
yahvo agniḥ.
(12)
Apām garbham darśatam oṣadhīnām,
vanā jajāna subhagā virūpam;
devāsaś cin manasā sam hi jagmuḥ,
paniṣṭham jātam tavasam
duvasyan. (13)
Bṛhanta id
bhānavo bhārjīkam,
agnim sacanta vidyuto na śukrāḥ;
guheva vṛddham
sadasi sve antar
apāra ūrve amṛtam duhānāḥ. (14)
"We have made the sacrifice to ascend towards the supreme,
let the Word increase. With kindlings of his fire, with obeisance
of submission they set Agni to his workings; they have given
expression in the heaven to the knowings of the seers and they
desire a passage for him in his strength, in his desire of the
word.
(2)
"Full of intellect, purified in discernment, the perfect friend
(or, perfect builder) from his birth of Heaven and of Earth, he
establishes the Bliss; the gods discovered Agni visible in the Waters, in the
working of the sisters.
(3)
"The seven Mighty Ones increased him who utterly enjoys
felicity, white in his birth, ruddy when he has grown. They
moved and laboured about him, the Mares around the new-born
child; the gods gave body to Agni in his birth.
(4)
"With his pure
bright limbs he extended and formed the middle world purifying the
will-to-action by the help of the pure lords of wisdom; wearing light as a
robe about all the life of the Waters he formed in himself glories vast and
without any deficiency.
(5)
"He moved everywhere about the Mighty Ones of Heaven,
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and they devoured not, neither were overcome, — they were not
clothed, neither were they naked. Here the eternal and ever young
goddesses from one womb held the one Child, they the Seven
Words.
(6)
"Spread out were the masses of him in universal forms in the
womb of the clarity, in the flowings of the sweetnesses; here the
fostering Rivers stood nourishing themselves; the two Mothers
of the accomplishing god became vast and harmonised.
(7)
"Borne by them,
O child of Force, thou didst blaze out holding thy
bright and rapturous embodiments; out flow the streams
of the sweetness, the clarity, where the Bull of the abundance
has grown by the Wisdom.
(8)
"He discovered at his birth the source of the abundance of
the Father and he loosed forth wide His streams and wide His
rivers. By his helpful comrades and by the Mighty Ones of
Heaven he found Him moving in the secret places of existence,
yet himself was not lost in their secrecy. (9)
"He bore the child of the Father and of him that begot him;
one, he fed upon his many mothers in their increasing. In this pure Male
both these powers in man (Earth and Heaven) have their common lord and
lover; do thou guard them both.
(10)
"Great in the unobstructed Vast he increased; yea, many
Waters victoriously increased Agni. In the source of the Truth he
lay down, there he made his home, Agni in the working of the un-
divided Sisters.
(11)
"As the mover in things and as their sustainer he in the
meeting of the Great Ones, seeking vision, straight in his lustres
for the presser-out of the Soma-wine, he who was the father of the
Radiances, gave them now their higher birth, — the child of the
Waters, the mighty and most strong Agni.
(12)
"To the visible Birth of the waters and of the growths of
Earth the goddess of Delight now gave birth in many forms, she
of the utter felicity. The gods united in him by the mind and they
set him to his working who was born full of strength and mighty
for the labour.
(13)
"Those vast shinings clove to Agni straight in his lustre and
were like bright lightnings; from him increasing in the secret
places of existence in his own seat within the shoreless Vast
they milked out Immortality."
(14)
Whatever may be the meaning of this passage, — and it is
absolutely clear that it has a mystic significance and is no mere
sacrificial hymn of ritualistic barbarians, — the seven rivers,
the waters, the seven sisters cannot here be the seven rivers of the
Punjab. The waters in which the gods discovered the visible
Agni cannot be terrestrial and material streams; this Agni who
increases by knowledge and makes his home and rest in the
source of the Truth, of whom Heaven and Earth are the wives
and lovers, who is increased by the divine waters in the un-
obstructed Vast, his own seat, and dwelling in that shoreless
infinity yields to the illumined gods the supreme Immortality,
cannot be the god of physical Fire. In this passage, as in so many
others, the mystical, the spiritual, the psychological character
of the burden of the Veda reveals itself not under the surface, not
behind a veil of mere ritualism, but openly, insistently, — in a
disguise indeed, but a disguise that is transparent, so that the
secret truth of the Veda appears here, like the rivers of Vishwamitra's hymn,
"neither veiled nor naked".
We see that these Waters are the same as those of Vamadeva's hymn, of
Vasishtha's, closely connected with the clarity
and the honey,—ghṛtasya
yonau sravathe madhūnām, ścotanti
dhārā madhuno ghṛtasya;
they lead to the Truth, they are themselves the source of the Truth, they flow
in the unobstructed and
shoreless Vast as well as here upon the earth. They are figured
as fostering cows (dhenavaḥ), mares (aśvāḥ), they are called sapta vānīḥ,
the seven Words of the creative goddess Vak, —
Speech, the expressive power of Aditi, of the supreme Prakriti
who is spoken of as the Cow just as the Deva or Purusha is
described in the Veda as Vrishabha or Vrishan, the Bull. They
are therefore the seven strands of all being, the seven streams or
currents or forms of movement of the one conscious existence.
We shall find that in the light of the ideas which we have
discovered from the very opening of the Veda in Madhuchchhandas' hymns and in
the light of the symbolic interpretations
which are now becoming clear to us, this passage apparently so
figured, mysterious, enigmatical becomes perfectly straightforward and
coherent, as indeed do all the passages of the Veda
which seem now almost unintelligible, when once their right clue
is found. We have only to fix the psychological function of Agni,
the priest, the fighter, the worker, the truth-finder, the winner of
beatitude for man; and that has already been fixed for us in the
first hymn of the Rig-veda of Madhuchchhandas' description of
him, — "the Will in works of the Seer true and most rich in
varied inspiration". Agni is the Deva, the All-Seer, manifested
as conscious-force or, as it would be called in modern language,
Divine or Cosmic Will, first hidden and building up the eternal
worlds, then manifest, "born", building up in man the Truth and
the Immortality.
Gods and men, says Vishwamitra in effect, kindle this divine
force by lighting the fires of the inner sacrifice; they enable it to
work by their adoration and submission to it; they express in
heaven, that is to say, in the pure mentality which is symbolised
by dyauḥ,
the knowings of the Seers, in other words the illuminations of the Truth-Consciousness
which exceeds Mind; and they
do this in order to make a passage for this divine force which in its
strength seeking always to find the word of right self-expression
aspires beyond mind. This divine will carrying in all its workings
the secret of the divine knowledge, kavikratuḥ, befriends or builds
up the mental and physical consciousness in man, divaḥ pṛthivyāḥ, perfects the intellect, purifies the discernment so that they grow to
be capable of the "knowings of the seers" and by the superconscient
Truth thus made conscient in us establishes firmly the
Beatitude (Riks 2.3).
The rest of the passage describes the ascent of this divine
conscious-force, Agni, this Immortal in mortals who in the
sacrifice takes the place of the ordinary will and knowledge of
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man, from the mortal and physical consciousness to the immortality of the
Truth and the Beatitude. The Vedic Rishis speak
of five births for man, five worlds of creatures where works are
done, pañca janāḥ,
pañca kṛṣṭīḥ or kṣitīḥ. Dyauh and pṛthivī represent the
pure mental and the physical consciousness; between
them is the antarikṣa,
the intermediate or connecting level of
the vital or, nervous consciousness. Dyauh. and pṛthivī are rodasī
our two firmaments; but these have to be overpassed, for then
we find admission to another heaven than that of the pure mind
—to the wide, the Vast which is the basis, the foundation (budhna) of the infinite consciousness, Aditi. This Vast is the
Truth which supports the supreme triple world, those highest
steps or seats (padāni, sadāmsi) of Agni, of Vishnu, those
supreme
Names of the Mother, the Cow, Aditi. The Vast or Truth is
declared to be the own or proper seat or home of Agni, svam
domain, svam sadaḥ.
Agni is described in this hymn ascending
from earth to his own seat.
This divine Power is found by the gods visible in the Waters,
in the working of the Sisters. These are the sevenfold Waters of
the Truth, the divine Waters brought down from the heights of
our being by Indra. First it is secret in the earth's growths, osadhīḥ,
the things that hold her heats, and has to be brought out
by a sort of force, by a pressure of the two araṇis, earth and
heaven. Therefore it is called the child of the earth's growths
and the child of the earth and heaven; this immortal Force is
produced by man with pain and difficulty from the workings
of the pure mind upon the physical being. But in the divine
Waters Agni is found visible and easily born in all his strength
and in all his knowledge and in all his enjoyment, entirely white
and pure, growing ruddy with his action as he increases (Rik 3).
From his very birth the Gods give him force and splendour and
body; the seven mighty Rivers increase him in his joy; they
move about this great new-born child and labour over him as the
Mares, aśvāḥ
(Rik 4).
The rivers, usually named
dhenavaḥ, fostering cows, are here
described as aśvāḥ. Mares, because while the Cow is the symbol
of consciousness in the form of knowledge, the Horse is the symbol of
consciousness in the form of force. Ashwa, the Horse, is
the dynamic force of Life, and the rivers labouring over Agni
on the earth become the waters of Life, of the vital dynamis or
kinesis, the Prana, which moves and acts and desires and enjoys.
Agni himself begins as material heat and power, manifests secondarily as the
Horse and then only becomes the heavenly fire.
His first work is to give as the child of the Waters its full form and
extension and purity to the middle world, the vital or dynamic
plane, raja ātatanvān. He purifies the nervous life in man pervading
it with his own pure bright limbs, lifting upward its impulsions and desires,
its purified will in works (kratum) by the
pure powers of the superconscient Truth and Wisdom, kavibhiḥ.
pavitraiḥ.
So he wears his vast glories, no longer the broken and
limited activity of desires and instincts, all about the life of the
Waters (Riks 4,5).
The sevenfold Waters thus rise upward and become the pure
mental activity, the Mighty Ones of Heaven. They there reveal
themselves as the first eternal ever-young energies, separate
streams but of one origin — for they have all flowed from the one
womb of the superconscient Truth — the seven Words or fundamental creative
expressions of the divine Mind, sapta vāṇīḥ. This life of the pure mind is not like that of the nervous life which
devours its objects in order to sustain its mortal existence; its
waters devour not but they do not fail; they are the eternal
truth robed in a transparent veil of mental forms; therefore, it
is said, they are neither clothed nor naked (Rik 6).
But this is not the last stage. The Force rises into the womb
or birthplace of this mental clarity (ghṛtasya) where the waters
flow as streams of the divine sweetness (sravathe madhūnām); there the forms it assumes are universal forms, masses of the vast
and infinite consciousness. As a result, the fostering rivers in the
lower world are nourished by this descending higher sweetness
and the mental and physical consciousness, the two first mothers
of the all-effecting Will, become in their entire largeness perfectly
equal and harmonised by this light of the Truth, through this
nourishing by the infinite Bliss. They bear the full force of Agni,
the blaze of his lightnings, the glory and rapture of his universal
forms. For where the Lord, the Male, the Bull of the abundance
is increased by the wisdom of the superconscient Truth, there
always flow the streams of the clarity and the streams of the
bliss (Riks 7,8).
The Father of all things is the Lord and Male; he is hidden
in the secret source of things, in the superconscient; Agni, with
his companion gods and with the sevenfold Waters, enters into
the superconscient without therefore disappearing from our conscient existence,
finds the source of the honeyed plenty of the
Father of things and pours them out on our life. He bears and
himself becomes the Son, the pure Kumara, the pure Male, the
One, the soul in man revealed in its universality; the mental and
physical consciousness in the human being accept him as their
lord and lover; but, though one, he still enjoys the manifold
movement of the rivers, the multiple cosmic energies (Riks 9,10)
Then we are told expressly that this infinite into which he
has entered and in which he grows, in which the many Waters
victoriously reaching their goal (yaśasaḥ) increase him, is the unobstructed
Vast where the Truth is born, the shoreless infinite,
his own natural seat in which he now takes up his home. There
the seven rivers, the sisters, work no longer separated though of
one origin as on the earth and in the mortal life, but rather as
indivisible companions (jāmīnām apasi svasṛṇām). In that entire
meeting of these great ones Agni moves in all things and upbears
all things; the rays of his vision are perfectly straight, no longer
affected by the lower crookedness; he from whom the radiances
of knowledge, the brilliant herds, were born, now gives them this
high and supreme birth; he turns them into the divine know-
ledge, the immortal consciousness (Riks 11,12).
This also is his own new and last birth. He who was born
as the Son of Force from the growths of earth, he who was born
as the child of the Waters, is now born in many forms to the
goddess of bliss, she who has the entire felicity, that is to say to
the divine conscious beatitude, in the shoreless infinite. The gods or divine
powers in man using the mind as an instrument reach him there, unite around
him, set him to the great work of the world in this new, mighty and
effective birth. They, the outshinings of the vast consciousness, cleave to this divine Force
as its bright lightnings and from him in the superconscient, the
shoreless vast, his own home, they draw for man the Immortality.
Such then, profound, coherent, luminous behind the veil of
figures is the sense of the Vedic symbol of the seven rivers, of
the Waters, of the five worlds, of the birth and ascent of Agni
which is also the upward journey of man and the gods whose
image man forms in himself from level to level of the great hill
of being (sānoḥ
sānum). Once we apply it and seize the true sense
of the symbol of the Cow and the symbol of the Soma with a just
conception of the psychological functions of the gods, all the apparent
incoherences and obscurities and far-fetched chaotic con-
fusion of these ancient hymns disappears in a moment. Simply,
easily, without straining there disengages itself the profound and
luminous doctrine of the ancient Mystics, the secret of the Veda.