Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 6 (Indian and Iranian).djvu/90

58 rejoiced in the hospitality of Agohya, they made fields and deflected the streams; plants occupied the dry ground and the waters the low lands. After their sleep they asked Agohya who had awakened them; in a year they looked around them; and the goat declared the dog to be the awakener. Agohya can hardly be anything but the sun, and the period of their sleep has been thought to be the winter solstice, and has been compared with the Teutonic twelve nights of licence at that period. The nights, it has been suggested, are intended to make good the defects of the Vedic year of 360 days by inserting intercalary days; and the goat and the dog have led to still wilder flights of speculative imagination. But as ṛbhu means "handy" or "dexterous" and is akin to the German Elbe and the English elf, and as the Ṛbhus are much more than mere men, it is not improbable that they represent the three seasons which mark the earliest division of the Indian year, and their dwelling in the house of Agohya signifies the turn of life at the winter solstice. The cup of Tvaṣṭṛ may possibly be the moon, and the four parts into which it is expanded may symbolize the four phases of the moon. They may, however, have had a humbler origin as no more than elves who gradually won a higher rank, although their human attributes may be due to another cause: it is possible that they were the favourite deities of a chariot-making clan which was admitted into the Vedic circle, but whose gods suffered some diminution of rank in the process, for it is a fact that in the period of the Brāhmaṇas the chariot-makers, or Rathakāras, form a distinct class by themselves.

Even more obscure than the Ṛbhus is the figure of the Gandharva; he bears the epithet Viśvāvasu ("Possessing All Good"), and this is later a proper name, while at the same time the single Gandharva is converted into many. This idea is not absolutely strange to the Ṛgveda, but it is found only thrice, and the name Gandharva is practically unknown to books ii-vii, the nucleus of the collection. Yet the figure is old, for the Gandarewa is found in the Avesta as a dragon-like monster.