A History of Indian Literature v1.c8.s2.86

v1.c8.s2.86

The songs leave no doubt that the myth of Indra's dragon-fight refers to some powerful natural phenomenon. Heaven and earth tremble when Indra slays Vṛtra. He does not destroy the dragon *once* only, but repeatedly, and he is invited also in the future always to kill Vṛtra, and to release the waters. Already the old Indian Veda-interpreters tell us that Indra is a god of the thunder-storm, and that by the mountains in which the waters are enclosed, we are to understand the clouds, in which Vṛtra—the demon of drought—keeps the waters imprisoned. Most of the European mythologists agreed with this opinion and saw in Indra, armed with a thunderbolt, a counterpart of the Teutonic Thunar, who swings the thunder-hammer Mjölnir, a thunder-god reaching back into the Indo-European prehistoric period, and in the dragon-fight a mythological representation of the thunderstorm. Hillebrandt, however, has tried to prove that Vṛtra is not a cloud-demon and not a demon of drought, but a winter-giant whose power is broken by the sun-god Indra; the "rivers" which are imprisoned by Vṛtra and set free by Indra, are, according to him, not the torrents of rain, but the rivers of the North-West of India which dry up in winter and are re-filled only when the sun causes the masses of snow of the Himalaya mountains to melt.