A Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology and Religion, Geography, History, and Literature c3.3

c3.3

The Aryan settlers were a pastoral and agricultural people, and they were keenly alive to those influences which affected their prosperity and comfort. They knew the effects of heat and cold, rain and drought, upon their crops and herds, and they marked the influence of warmth and cold, sunshine and rain, wind and storm, upon their own personal comfort. They invested these benign and evil influences with a personality; and behind the fire, the sun, the cloud, and the other powers of nature, they saw beings who directed them in their beneficent and evil operations. To these imaginary beings they addressed their praises, and to them they put up their prayers for temporal blessings. They observed also the movements of the sun and moon, the constant succession of day and night, the intervening periods of morn and eve, and to these also they gave personalities, which they invested with poetical clothing and attributes. Thus observant of nature in its various changes and operations, alive to its influences upon themselves, and perceptive of its beauties, they formed for themselves deities in whose glory and honour they exerted their poetic faculty. They had no one god in particular, no superior deity guiding and controlling the rest, but they paid the tribute of their praise to the deity whose bounties they enjoyed, or whose favours they desired for bodily comfort. They lauded also in glowing language the personifications of those beauties of nature which filled their minds with delight and kindled the poetic fire. So each of the deities in turn received his meed of praise, and each in his turn was the powerful god, able to accomplish the desires of his votary or to excite a feeling of awe or admiration.