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Maria Schetelich

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Maria Schetelich (born in 1938) is a German Indologist.

Quotes

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  • This spreading of light is a frequent motif in Rgvedic hymns. The motif is worked out by the poets on two different levels, the human, and the super-human. On the human level it is the succour Indra lends to his adorants (the drya or dryavarm) in their combats against the non-vedic dasa-or dasyu tribes. On the super- human level, Indra’s (and the Aryan’s adversaries are evil-doing, demonical beings like Susna, Pipru, Vrtra, Vala, Sambara or the above-mentioned Arsasana. They also are called dasa or dasyu, their symbol is darkness, night, the depth, the lowest region of the world.
  • Considering context and construction of the verses the term cited ‘dark skin’ should not merely be taken as a reference to the complexion of certain non-vedic people but as a quantity of its own, a symbolic expression for the darkness, the embodiment of the forces impairing the well-being of the Aryan tribes. As such, it fits into a complex of mythological motifs centered on the polarity of evil and good which plays an important role in the world-view of the Vedic tribes. Criterion for the qualification of a phenomenon as good was the relation to .society, religion and cult of the Vedic Aryan. As good the Rgvedic hymns classify the light, bright, goldencolourcd, the sun, heaven and large space, well-being and security, the right (religio-rnoral) norms and behaviour [suvrala), the arya or aryavarna Indra. Soma and their adoration by sacrificing to them, to the sphere of evil belong darkness, the night, the black colour, the unbelieving and non-sacrificing (to Indra and Soma) people, the dilsa, the dasyu, a bad or no vrata at all {apa- anya or avrata), the ‘black skin’, the depth, danger, narrowness. It was already in the middle of the former century that Christian Lassen qualified the opposition of arya and dasyu or dasa as a contrast between different religions expressed by the age-old symbolism of black opposed to white and not as a contrast of dark- complexioned to white coloured men.
  • Krsna tvac as a metaphor for darkness in the RV yet is no abstract idea, but in the minds of Rgvedic man a real part of the world, of the cosmological scheme. The poets describe it eventually as a cloth a cover which could spread over the earth. Darkness is related to the ‘depth’, the lowest region of the trinominal concept of the world-structure, being at the same time the home of the waters. Two verses give a vivid picture of this. In RV 4. 13. 4 the poet adresses Surya who drove away the nig'ht ...Definitely the verse means the night, the “black cloth” lying over the earth, not the symbolical darkness. But in the minds of the poets the bounds between real and symbolic darkness were fluent, as RV 4. 17. 14 — 15 suggests... If at the three above cited passages krsna tvac is translated with ‘dark cloth, dark cover’ but not with ‘dark skin’ in the sense of ‘dark complexion’ it fits better into the habits of thinking of the Rgvedic poets, than the rather trivial translation current up till now. Assumedly the Rgvedic hymns are mythological poetry not in the first line depicting real events but out of these events creating myths — myths as models for reality. The fight against enemies dominating the life of the Aryan immigrants, this theme presented itself to be an excellent (and necessary) subject for mythologization.
  • There are a whole series of standard opinions in the Indological literature, which are regarded as expressions of proven research results and are adopted in this capacity from one book to another to this day, without anyone believing that they need to be checked again against the source material and/or in the context of newer research and hypotheses. One of these standard opinions is the view that the population that the Arya encountered when they immigrated to India was radically different from them, especially in terms of their external appearance. They were dark-skinned and flat-nosed and spoke a different language - so says the Rgveda.
  • It is a victory of light, of the sun, of wide space over darkness, narrowness or distress, which is equated or compared with the victory of day over night. Light, sunbeams or fire are also the means by which Indra overcomes evil and its representations, and again the boundary between the human and the supernatural sphere is quite fluid. The ancient symbolism of black and white also serves to depict the all-dominating polarity of good and evil, light and darkness. Bright, golden, shiny, white is everything that symbolizes light, that brings it to power or is otherwise connected to it: the sun, the soma drops, the day, Indra's dun horses, etc. m. Bright, shining, white is accordingly the color of those on whose side and for whose benefit Indra fights .
  • However, if one looks at the passages more closely, the context and sentence or verse construction also allow for a different interpretation, especially since tvac - more on this below - is used much more frequently in the meaning "fur, blanket" than in the meaning "(human) skin".
  • One does more justice to the way of thinking of the poets of the Rgveda and the nature of this text if one places the term krsnä tvac in RV 1.130.8 in the context of the ideas of the "skin" or the "black skin" that are common elsewhere and thus assigns it to the vocabulary of Rgvedic mythology, especially since the equation of the Dasyu and Dasa with the non-Aryan population of northwest India can be doubted with good reason.
  • And so a gap is definitely apparent: there is a lack of a scientific history of the term “Aryan” that would illuminate the entire breadth of meaning that the term has been given since its inception, and it is the classical Indologists familiar with the field of research who are in demand here.
    • Schetelich, M. (2002). Bild, Abbild, Mythos-die Arier in den Arbeiten deutscher Indologen. " Arier" und" Draviden", 40-56. p. 43
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