Rather, he was an anthropomorphic deity essentially independent of the various natural phenomena and celestial luminaries he impelled. As it turns out, there is no conclusive evidence that Savitṛ was associated with any single phenomenon or luminary at all, nor can he be connected with the rainy season or water in general. In discussing the theories proposed so far, I not only consider the Vedic sources but also re-evaluate the archaeoastronomical arguments with reliable software. The aims of this paper are (a) to review the various theories about Savitṛ’s manifestations in nature and (b) to explain how different natural phenomena and celestial luminaries could be associated with this god. According to Falk, this association was also responsible for the employment of a verse addressing Savitṛ (a so-called sāvitrī) in the initiation of the Vedic student, whose studies originally began at the onset of the rainy season.
Harry Falk, for instance, argued that this god, whose name literally means the ‘impeller’, can be identified with the Milky Way and associated with the rainy season. The problematic identity of the deity Savitṛ in early Vedic religion has sparked more than a century of discussion.
An appendix also provides a collection of more than sixty scholarly translations into European languages. To this end, each textual component of the Gāyatrī-Mantra is analyzed in dedicated sections. In other words, this paper explores how the mantra would be understood by users of Vedic and Sanskrit. It provides grammatical, morphological, etymological, lexical, and semantic analyses of the textual content of the mantra against the background of the linguistic changes that took place during the transition from early to late Old Indo-Aryan. The aim of this paper is to remedy this situation. Yet, translators of the Gāyatrī-Mantra have rarely taken into consideration that language changes over time, and that this has an impact on how the mantra is to be translated. Many authors seem to have felt that a famous mantra such as this one must have, or allow for, several interpretations and translations – a position that is not without justification, especially when it comes to mantras. No single standard translation of the mantra known as Sāvitrī, Gāyatrī, or Gāyatrī-Mantra (Ṛgveda III 62.10) has ever become widely accepted.
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