The Descent of the Sun

Thank you for checking out this book by Theophania Publishing. We appreciate your business and look forward to serving you soon. We have thousands of titles available, and we invite you to search for us by name, contact us via our website, or download our most recent catalogues. HERE is a fairy tale which I found in an old Hindu manuscript. As the title shows, it is a solar myth. Literally translated, its name is: The glory of the Going Down of the Sun. But this is only the exoteric, physical envelope of the inner, mystical meaning, which is: The Divine Lustre1 of the Descent (Incarnation) of Him Who took Three Steps: i.e. Vishnu, or the Sun, the later Krishna, or Hindu Apollo. And this epithet of the Sun is explained by the well-known passage in the Rig-Veda Shrí also means a Sacred Lotus, and it is the name of the twelfth Digit of the Moon: thus indicating the position of this story in the series to which it belongs: for an account of which, and the manuscript, I may refer the reader to the preface to her predecessor Shashiní, entitled A Digit of the Moon. ), 'Three steps did Vishnu stride: thrice did he set down his foot.' A mythological expression for the rise, the zenith, and the set of the Sun. But the old magnificent simplicity of the Rig-Veda was perverted by subsequent Pauranik glosses; and Vishnu, according to the new legend, was said to have cheated his adversary, Bali, by striding, in his Dwarf Incarnation, over the three worlds.