Auld lang syne. Second series : $b My Indian friendsMüller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
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Auld lang syne. Second series : $b My Indian friends
Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
India; Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max), 1823-1900 -- Friends and associates
Surely not even Deva is the same as Deus; though it may be the same
sound, it does not represent the same meaning, so that strictly speaking
we cannot translate the one by the other. The Greek concept of Zeus also
was very different from that of the Vedic Dyaus, as that of Eos from
that of Ushas. I never went so far as to claim for Greek and Vedic
deities what might be called personal or bodily identity. I was simply
looking for germs which after thousands of years might have developed
into a Sûrya in the Veda, and into a Helios in Homer. These very modest
claims may possibly surprise my adversaries, for, to judge from their
remarks, they evidently imagined that I recognised in Zeus a heavenly
king who had migrated from India to Greece, and in the Haritas the
horses of the morning who in their journey to Greece had been
metamorphosed into the brilliant children of Helios and Aigle. I even
begin to see why what some critics supposed to have been my idea, should
have ruffled their temper so much, and I say once more, and I hope for
the last time, that I never believed that Athênê lived in the thoughts
of Vedic Rishis, nor Varu_n_a in the prayers of Greek priests. No, I am
and always have been satisfied with far less. All I stand up for is
that, given the sky, the Greeks raised Dyu, sky, to become their Zeus,
while the Vedic Rishis made the sky their Dyaus. This Dyaus is
superseded in the Veda by his own son, Indra, whereas Zeus in Greece
remained to the end the θεῶν ὕπατος καὶ ἄριστος. What is common to both
is the word, that is, the concept of Dyaus, or Greek Zeus, the sky as a
person and as an agent. I may not always have spoken quite guardedly,
and have taken certain things for granted which are understood by
themselves among scholars. The important lesson is always the same. If
Ahanâ is phonetically identical with Greek Athanâ and if Ahanâ is a name
of the Dawn, it follows that the first conception of Athênê was the Dawn
and that, as such, she sprang from the East or from the forehead of Zeus
or Dyaus, the sky. If in the Veda she brings light and wakes and stirs
up the thoughts of men, she became in Homer also the goddess of wisdom
and the τεχνῶν μήτηρ πολύολβος. All this was perfectly known to Otfried
Müller when in 1825 he wrote: “Because the name of the goddess was
originally a word of the language and always remained so, Charis glided
from poem to poem and preserved by means of the word her general meaning
in every individual manifestation” (p. 249).
Sûn_ri_tâ, another name of the Dawn, is more difficult to explain.
Sûn_ri_ta in the sense of true, seems to me to have been formed in
mistaken analogy to An-_ri_ta[34], untrue, and to have meant originally
true, then sincere, gentle, agreeable. As applied to the Dawn it would
have meant true, kind, auspicious.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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