“True with the true, great with the great, goddess with goddesses, venerable with the venerable,” she would appear from afar, head high, “bright beacon of the immortal,” dripping moisture, on a chariot drawn by pink horses, laden with ritual offerings. Always powdered with the same makeup, “like women on their way to an assignation,” she bathed standing up, the better to be seen, white, gleaming, born from black, buzzing around men like a fly. Why? To awaken them. Awakening: this was the “fine virtue” of Uṣas, her impalpable gift, as the gifts she received were likewise impalpable: mere words arranged in meters. Never the slaughtered animal, never the libation. Just words.
Uṣas has a prefix peculiar to herself: prati-, which is a “coming to meet” someone, a stepping forward, face-to-face, from the furthest distances. The hymn singers never wearied of praising Uṣas’s breasts. “Young and brazen, forward she comes”: thus Uṣas appears. And what is her first gesture? “She bares her breasts. like a loose woman.” Or, with an observation that was also an invitation, they remarked: “Girl full of smiles, bare your breasts when you shine in the east”; “You bare your breasts to make yourself beautiful.” If Uṣas was slow to make the gesture, the singers were quick as chroniclers to remind: “Going to meet men, like a beautiful young woman, she pops out her breasts.”
Awakening is a vision that comes forward. It is the first image that adheres to the mind, flood tide of fullness, of a taste hitherto unknown. It is Uṣas who welcomes the pūrváhūti, the “first ritual call,” which is also the “first thought,” pūrvácitti. There’s a race to be the first one to think of her. And to receive grace is to be the first one she thinks of. Here the goddess is subject and object, coupling without end. Since she is the first. Uṣas is the unique, she from whom all others issue, to whom they return, but she is also — immediately — multiple, surrounded by emulators and look-alikes. She appears “from day to day bearing her many names.” There is no Uṣas without uṣásah, countless “Dawns bearing happy names,” which echo her, disperse her, until you ask: Which one is Uṣas?
Thirteen times the Ṛg Veda speaks of a goddess who is svásṛ, “sister.” Eleven of those times it means Uṣas. Intimate with everyone, no other divinity could boast such an abundance of kinfolk. She was reputed to have many lovers, and often enough they were her brothers — Agni? Pūṣan? Sūrya? the Aśvin twins? She was the only goddess of whom such stories were told. One day the young Śunaḥśepa found himself tied to a sacrificial stake. His father had sold him for a hundred cows so that he could be sacrificed instead of someone else. The appointed time drew near. Then the Aśvin twins suggested he invoke Uṣas. Śunaḥśepa remembered a hymn that had been dear to him, that he had sung many times, thinking of Uṣas, of the lover he had always desired, never believing she would be his. Śunaḥśepa said: “What mortal can presume to possess you, immortal Uṣas, you who love as you will? Who will you choose from among us, o radiant one?” He went on invoking her. Verse after verse, the cords that bound him came undone.
Uṣas and Sandhyā, the two fatal maidens, were Dawn and Dusk. Why was their beauty thought to be superior to any other that would ever be? Those two moments, the unfettering and the fading of the light, this entry into the manifest and retreat from it, were articulation itself, were “connection,” bandhu. But not the usual connection, between two similar and manifest beings, or between two equally visible shapes. Here what emerged was the connection between the manifest and the unmanifest, between two worlds that might have remained forever separate — but which now came together, surfaced together in the bodies of those two girls who look back and flee. This connection tended to become something else too: a coupling. Everybody wanted to couple with Uṣas, with Sandhyā, because coupling is the image of connection: not the other way around. Uṣas and Sandhyā were the image of supreme connection. The first particle of the invisible that penetrated them was time.
Every morning, at first light, they evoked Uṣas, strung together her sixteen epithets, sang in many meters of her gifts, of the endless extravagance they expected from her, a punctual prodigality. These words were to waken her, so that Uṣas might waken them. Each act could find a meaning only if preceded by that other act, awakening, which anchors the mind to what is, existence. But beneath the surface they harbored a dark and growing rancor toward that girl with the copper hair, who brushed against them only to desert them. At every blinking of an eyelid they remembered that Uṣas mocked them as she played, that she always won, then ran off with the prize, with life. Or they thought of her as Varuṇa’s spy, doing his job for him, since everybody knows that for Varuṇa “the blinkings of a man’s eyelids are numbered.” To awaken means to blink one’s eyelids. But the gods do not blink. That was all it took to seal the fate of men who do not want to die. One day someone would avenge them of the wrong done by the fatal maiden with the copper hair. It happened once — and never ceased to happen, right up to Gilda and beyond.
Indra knew the hiding place where the Cows, the Dawns, the Waters, lay concealed. He crouched down in deep dark, waiting to pounce. The dazzling lights of Uṣas’s chariot had barely taken shape when he attacked. He waved a lethal weapon, quite out of proportion with his adversary, that nimble, ivoried chariot, counterpoint to its rider’s ornaments. And Uṣas was already fleeing, hitting high notes of terror. Was it a comedy? Was it a play? Grimly, Indra unleashed his rage on the empty chariot. He split through yoke and shaft. He was like a crazed warrior, tormented by some pain no one understood. And awkward too, in the fury of blows he rained down on that sumptuous and delicate object.
It wasn’t a sight to be proud of, Uṣas’s flight, as trembling and terrified she stumbled over her embroidered robes while Indra’s lightning split her chariot. And the rabble of men whose bigoted blah-blah had egged Indra on looked at once laughable and dire. Thus was established the model of all moral zeal. Later to receive its official seal in Upper Iran, cradle of the Āryas, in the place and in the language, Avestic, where for the first time they sought to split the cosmos in two, dividing it up into Good Creation and Bad Creation. Upon which the beautiful and heedless Uṣas was transformed into an evil demon they called Bušyanstā, she who says to men: “Not yet, not yet.” For centuries afterward poet upon poet would evoke the “rosy-fingered” Dawn. They forgot that the girl had suffered persecution at the hands of gods and men. She was the first to meet that fate henceforth reserved for beautiful women: beatings and banishment.
“Indra’s quarrel with Uṣas. A strange myth. No motive is ever suggested,” remarks a puzzled Geldner in a note on the only Vedic hymn in which Indra’s attack on Uṣas’s chariot is briefly described. “A mythical element which only appears outside of the hymns to Uṣas, and always abruptly, unexpectedly, like an errutic block, such is the image of Indra splitting Uṣas’s chariot,” remarks a puzzled Renou. Why on earth should Indra, the liberator, attack Uṣas, whom he had liberated? What respect did he hope to gain among men with that cowardly, incongruous deed? There was a dark story, behind it all, which no one has told. Dark as Dawn. “Which is the dark face of Dawn?” asked Ānanda K. Coomaraswamy, in the manner of the ṛṣis. And the answer could hardly be other than dark, imperceptible as the blinking of an eyelid.