href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@38687@[email protected]#Footnote_104_104" class="fnanchor pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">[104] Another hymn tells us that the handsome one follows the beautiful one, the brother the sister, like a lover,[105]—the aurora fleeing from the sun, her brother, out of shame, and her brother following her, actuated by a brutal instinct. Finally, a third hymn shows us the Vedic Vulcan, the blacksmith of the gods, the sun Tvashṭar, called also the omniform sun (Sâvitâ Viçvarûpah), as father of Saraṇyû, another name for the aurora, omniform herself, like her father (and, like the cow, undergoing the triple transmutation at the hands of Tvashṭar, i.e., the three brothers, the Ṛibhavas), creating another form of himself, that is, the sun Vivasvant, to be able to espouse the aurora. Saraṇyû, perceiving perhaps that Vivasvant is her father under another shape, creates another woman like herself, and flees away on the chariot that flies of itself, and that was before given her by her father; and thereupon Vivasvant, in order to overtake her, transforms himself into a horse.[106]

But sometimes the alienation the sun and the aurora, the young husband and wife, is not due to evil propensities in themselves, but the decree of fate working through the machinations of monsters. The two beautiful ones are at bottom united by love and reciprocal gratitude; for now it is the sun who delivers the aurora, and now the aurora who liberates the sun; and we have already seen the aurora making the ambrosial milk drop for the sun from her cows, and the sun drawing up and delivering the cows of the aurora. There is a hymn in which the divine girl, the aurora, comes up in the east, with a lascivious air, smiling, fresh, uncovering her bosom, resplendent, towards the god who sacrifices himself,[107] that is to say, towards the sun, towards Çunahçepas (the sun), who, in three verses of another hymn,[108] invokes her, the well-known legend of which, narrated in the Âitareya-Brâhmaṇam, I shall briefly relate. The aurora has also the merit of having, with her pure and purifying light, opened the gates of the gloomy cavern, discomfited the enemies, the shades of night, and exposed to view the treasures hidden by the darkness (and here we have Medea again, but this time in a benignant form); she awakens to activity the sleepers and everything with life (and therefore, among the living sleepers, the sun, her son, whom one of the hymns represents as sleeping profoundly in the bosom of the darkness of night); she is the saviour of mortals,[109] that is to say, she protects mortals from death, and resuscitates them; she sees and foresees everything.[110] The awakener is also the awakened; the illuminator is also the illumined, or the wise; and the illumined or luminous one is also the beautiful one. From being small, she is become large[111] (the heroes and heroines of mythology are only small at birth, and pass at once into fulness of stature); from being infirm and sombre-visaged, by the grace of Indras and of the Açvinâu, she is cured and restored to strength and clearness.[112] But why was she dark at first? Because her mother, the night, is the black one; she, the white one, is born of the black one.[113]