The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c17.72

v1.c17.72

The comparative simplicity of the life of the Vedic Indian stands in striking contrast to the elaboration of the religious side of life by the priests. The Rigveda does not present us with any naïve outpouring of the primitive religious consciousness, but with a state of belief which must have been the product of much priestly effort, and the outcome of wholesale syncretism. Nothing else can explain the comparative magnitude of the Vedic pantheon, which considerably exceeds that of the Homeric poems. In the main, the religion revealed to us is in essence simple. The objects of the devotion of the priests were the great phenomena of nature, conceived as alive, and usually represented in anthropomorphic shape, though not rarely theriomorphism is referred to. The chief gods include Dyaus, the sky, who is usually coupled with Pṛithivī, the earth, and whose anthropomorphism is faint, being in the main confined to the conception of him as father. Varuṇa, the sky-god *par excellence*, has superseded Dyaus as a popular figure, and has acquired moreover a moral elevation, which places him far above the other gods. Varuṇa is the subject of the most exalted hymns of the Rigveda; but it seems clear that in this period his claim to divine preeminence was being successfully challenged by the much less ethical Indra, the god of the thunder-storm which causes the rain to pour, when the rainy season long hoped for comes to relieve the parched earth. Varuṇa bears the epithet Asura, which serves to show his parallelism with Ahura Mazda, the highest of Irānian gods; nor can there be any reason to doubt that in the Indo-Irānian period he acquired his moral elevation and preeminence. But in India it seems that his star paled before that of Indra, whose importance grew with the advance of the Āryan tribes to the regions where the rain was confined in the main to the rainy months and the terrors of the storm supplanted in the popular imagination the majestic splendour of the sky. With Varuṇa seems to have been bound up in the first instance the conception of *ṛita* as first cosmic and then moral order, and with his lessening glory these conceptions fade from Indian thought. The importance of the sun is shown by the fact that no less than five high gods seem to be solar—Sūrya and Savitṛi, who represent the quickening power of the luminary, Mitra, whose fame in Irān is but palely reflected in India, where he is conjoined with Varuṇa and eclipsed by Varuṇa's glories, Pūshan, the representative of the power of the sun in its effect on the growth of herds and vegetation, and Vishṇu, the personification of the swift moving sun and a god destined to become one of the two great gods of India. Çiva, his great rival in later days, appears in the name of Rudra, seemingly in essence at this time a storm-god, with a dark side to his character presaging his terrible aspect in later days. Other gods are the Açvins, apparently the morning and evening stars, who are clearly parallel to the Dioscuri, the Maruts, storm-gods and attendants on Rudra, Vāyu and Vāta, the wind-gods, Parjanya, the god of rain, the Waters, and the Rivers. Ushas the Dawn, deserves separate mention, since she has evoked some of the most beautiful of Vedic poetry; but her figure seems to belong to the earliest period of Vedic hymnology, when the Indians were still in the Punjab; and after the Rigveda she vanishes swiftly from the living gods of the pantheon.