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❖ மறைமலையம் - 31
science of Astronomy has as yet succeeded in finding out the exact nature of that unimaginable state.
Leaving out therefore, that fruitless inquiry, we must confine our attention to our luminary which gives out light and heat that pervade all throughout the universe that our vision and imagination can comprehend. There is not a needle-point of space which the brilliant rays of the sun have not touched. This earth and all other planets that go around it are being illuminated only by its resplendent light. As it were all bodies are immersed in it or are floating in it. Now, what can be more intimate to man and other beings, animate and inanimate, than this light, this heat which not only bring forth and sustain all beings, but illumine the sight of all sentient beings and through it their understanding also? If there be no light, no heat, no materials for producing heat and light, as in the polar regions from which the sunlight is completely absent for two full months and in which nothing for making fire is procurable, will it be possible for us to get enlightenment of understanding even were it possible to eke out our bare and miserable existence under such inefficient conditions in nature? No, certainly not. It is, therefore, not unreasonable to hold with our forefathers that the light itself is God or the only true form of God, that the fire which is the source of light and heat is the only abode of God or God itself. This spiritual nature of light and heat and fire is emphasized in the body of the work by referring to the widespread worship paid to the sun, moon and fire by such early civilized people as the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Chaldeans, the Persians, the Mexicans and by other uncivilized tribes all over the world as fully pointed out by Dr. J.G. Frazer.
Now, this intuitive perception of the existence of God in light and fire aided, of course, by an acute discriminative understanding helped the ancient Tamilians to detect in it the combination of two fundamental principles which are always at work not only in the creative and sustaining processes but also in the process of consuming the used-up materials. These two are the heat and the
