The Development of Hindu Iconography c10.4.2

c10.4.2

Among the several constituent factors which make up this element in its secondary aspect, the most important ones are 'belief in one personal god as spiritual being, the faith that his power is sufficient to secure that at the last the good will conquer, and lastly a conception of the nexus that binds together God and his worshippers as mainly moral."¹ In the later stratum of the Ṛgveda, we find the struggling appearance of one supreme entity into which all the separately conceived Vedic divinities are merged.² Some faint traces of the belief in one moral god who looks after the consciences and works of men are certainly present in some of the Ṛgvedic characterisations of Varuṇa to whom prayers for forgiveness are offered by the hymnists.³ Keith has observed, "The thought of India started from a religion which had in Varuṇa a god of decidedly moral character and the simple worship of that deity with its consciousness of sin and trust in the divine forgiveness is doubtless one of the first roots of Bhakti."⁴ But this kind of worship dedicated to such a god was arrested in its growth, and the prominence given to the other gods like Indra, Agni, Soma, and others, intimately associated with sacrifice, adversely affected it. Even then in one of the late hymns of the Ṛgveda (X.