Page:Atharva-Veda samhita volume 2.djvu/452

xix. 7- for imagining that áyana in d contains any hidden reference to the solstice (in later astronomical language, ayana, by abbreviation for ayanānta 'end of a [northern or southern] progress of the sun') as occurring in Maghās.

3. Be the former Phalgunīs and Hasta here auspicious (púṇyam); be Chitrā propitious, and Svāti easy (sukhá) for me; be the two Viçākhās bestowal (rā́dhas), Anurādhā easy of invocation, Jyeshṭhā a good asterism, Mūla uninjured.

There are sundry difficulties in this verse, in part attempted to be removed by emendation in our edition. It is very strange to find in a the former Phalgunīs distinctly mentioned, and the latter (uttara) as distinctly left out; it would be easy to put the dvayā́ of 5 b in place of pū́rvā here;* or one wonders whether uttara is not somehow hidden in the awkwardly redundant átra. All the mss. (both saṁh. and pada) agree in the ungrammatical ⌊ending -tí of⌋ svātí, and SPP. accordingly admits svātí into his text: ours emends to svātís: svātī́ would have been equally acceptable, and is supported by two of SPP's çrotriyas ⌊V. and K.⌋ and by the comm. The masc. sukhás (p. su॰kháḥ) can hardly be tolerated; we ought to have sukhám, or else, with the comm., sukhā́. All the mss. read in c rā́dhe, as if there were an adjective rā́dha; SPP. and the comm. read rā́dhe, the latter explaining it as another name for viçākhe (not a word defining the expected blessing!): this involves an anachronism,† and would be in the highest degree improbable even if it did not: rā́dho is a very easy and plausible improvement. Finally, all the mss. have in d áriṣṭa mū́lam ⌊cf. note to xviii. 2. 3⌋, which SPP. adopts, in spite of its utter ungrammaticalness; the comm., with his usual disregard of pada-text and accent, appears to understand ariṣṭamūlam, a compound.

* ⌊Or rather to put dvayé? The comm. renders pū́rvā by pūrve, for which pū́rvā is a bad reading or a worse solecism. But the position of ca, too, is very suspicious.⌋ †⌊I suppose Whitney's implication is that rādhā, as a name for the 14th (or 16th) asterism viçākhā, is a later one, based on a misunderstanding of the name of the 15th (or 17th) asterism, anurādhā, which word simply means 'success' (cf. ánv eṣām arātsmé ’ti: tád anūrādhā́ḥ, TB. i. 5. 2$8$), but was thought of as meaning the one 'after (anu) or following rādhā.'⌋

4. Let the former Ashāḍhās give me food; let the latter ones bring refreshment; let Abhijit give me what is auspicious; let Çravaṇa [and] the Çravishṭhās make good prosperity.