The Red Cows of Morning

The people who made the Rigveda counted their wealth in cattle. They knew what a herd looks like when it comes out of the pen at first light, pushing and steaming, red and brown backs moving together through the gate.

So when a poet of the Gotama family looked east one morning, that is what he saw in the sky.

"The Dawns have raised their banner," he sang. "In the eastern half of the air they spread their light. Like fighting men making their weapons ready, on they come, bright red, the mother cows."

He looked again and saw more.

"The red beams have shot up. The red cows are yoked, and they are easy to yoke."

For in these hymns the cows do two jobs at once. They are the herd that walks ahead of Dawn, and they are also the team that pulls her cart. One poet says her car is drawn by red oxen. Another says the cattle that carry her are red and shining. A third, in a very short hymn, says simply that the cows are coming with full udders, following her path.

And she herself is their mother. "Mother of the Cows," the poets call her, more than once. One of them puts her colour beside theirs: she is the mother of the herd, he says, and red as a bright red mare.

The Gotama poet watched her come on.

He saw her put on her finery like a dancer dressing for the dance. He heard the dawns singing as they came, like women busy at their work, all walking the same road from far away. And he saw the darkness give way, and found the right words for it.

"Dawn has thrown the darkness open," he sang, "the way cows push open their pen."

By now the whole sky was full. Another poet, standing in another place on another morning, said it for him: "Our eyes see your rays, like herds of cattle let out to graze. Dawn has filled the wide sky."

Are they cows or are they rays of light, you may ask. The poets do not choose. "She spreads out her rays like cattle," one says, and leaves it there.

What they do next is very practical. A person who has just watched a herd of red cattle cross the sky asks the herd's owner for a share.

"Dawn, give us wealth in cows and horses," the Gotama poet sang. "Give us strength, and sons, and a name that travels far."

The poet of the fourth book was bolder. He looked at the cart with its red team and asked the goddesses a question.

"Tell me, Dawns. This cart of yours, is it an old one, or is it new today?"

He got no answer. She has driven that road every morning since before anyone can remember, and every morning the cart looks as if it had just been built.

The poets of the Vasishtha family were proud of being early. "The Vasishthas are the first awake," they sang, "to welcome Dawn with songs."

They sang of the daily herd as the other families did. Their Dawn sends out her light with fine oxen, and they call her the leader of the cows. But they also kept an older story, of a time when the light did not come by itself.

Once, they said, the light lay hidden in darkness.

It was found by the Fathers, the ancient sages who sat at the feast with the gods and were true to the law of things. They did not dig it out. They sang.

"The Fathers found the light that was hidden," runs the verse. "With words that came true, they brought the Dawn to birth."

Another verse remembers the noise of it. The singers roused her with a roar like the bellowing of a bull, and then the rock gave way.

"You unbarred the doors of the firm mountain," the Vasishthas tell her.

In their telling Dawn is not only the prize inside the mountain. She is one of those who broke it. "True with the true, great with the great, a goddess among gods," they sing, "she broke down the strong fences and gave out the cattle. The cows lowed as they greeted the Dawn."

Twice the Vasishthas give her a title that belongs to those first singers. They call her the best of the Angirases, as if she had been one of the company at the cave.

A much later handbook to the hymns, the Brihaddevata, agrees. When it lists the gods who split open the cave called Vala, it names Indra and Brihaspati, and it names Ushas with them.

So when a Vasishtha poet stood up before sunrise and sang, he was doing what the Fathers had done, and each morning's herd was that first herd coming out again.