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The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c7.s1: The Pantheon of the Veda

The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c7.s1

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The Pantheon of the Veda

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At the outset we may observe that this word applies to the Vedic gods only in an analogical sense. There is no Pantheon in the Veda, if by Pantheon we mean an Olympus patterned after a more or less snobbish conception of a royal household, in which every god holds his position and exacts sensitive respect from all the others as the price of his own observance of court proprieties. The Vedic gods have no acknowledged head. They group themselves to some extent according to their characters; for instance, as sun-gods, or storm-gods. As such they have more or less definite habitations. In the time of the great Epic, the Mahābhārata, no one knows how many hundreds of years later, they really do manage to foregather in the heaven of one of them, namely, Indra's heaven. They begin to take rank: Indra first, Agni second, and so on. With that comes a little, very little, of those roseate poetic and plastic possibilities which the poets and artists of all ages have read into the finishedly human Greek Olympus. We have seen enough of our theme to know that many gods of the Veda are scarcely more than half persons, their other half being an active force of nature. Such material is not yet ripe even for a Hindu Olympus. The mind of the Vedic poet is the rationalistic mind of the ruminating philosopher, rather than the artistic mind which reproduces the finished product. It is engaged too much in reasoning about and constantly altering the wavering shapes of the gods, so that these remain to the end of Vedic time too uncertain in outline, too fluid in substance for the modelling hand of the artist. On a pinch we could imagine a statue of the most material of the Vedic gods, Indra; but it is hard to imagine a statue of the god Varuna. As a matter of fact there is no record of Vedic ikons, or Vedic temples. In all these senses there is no Vedic Pantheon.

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It would seem possible to present the Vedic gods in the order of their importance, but many are equally, or nearly equally, important. We find nearly a dozen of them engaged in creating the world, and rather more than a dozen engaged in producing the sun, placing it on the sky, or preparing a path for it; under these circumstances it is not easy to rank them.¹ The gods have not all of them come into existence at the same time. Some belong to Indo-European times; others to Indo-Iranian times. Of the rest some come from an earlier, some from a later period of the Veda. If we had all the dates we might try a chronological arrangement pure and simple, but we do not have all the dates.

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¹ See Macdonell, *Vedic Mythology*, p. 15.

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A celebrated ancient Hindu glossographer and etymologer of the name of Yāska reports three lists, respectively of 32, 36, and 31 gods, or semi-divine beings.² The last of these seems to begin to tell us in what succession the Vedic gods appear on the stage day by day, especially in the morning.³ He begins well with the Açvins, or "Horsemen" (the Vedic Dioscuri),⁴ Ushas, the Goddess Dawn, and Sūryā, the "Sun-Maiden." Soon, however, he grows problematic, or dunder-headed, with Vrishākapāyī, Saraṇyū, Tvashtar, and so on. Many years' occupation with the writings of this worthy, whose sense and erudition are valued much by the Hindus, as well as by Western scholars, have not increased my belief in his authority, or decreased my faith in the infinite possibilities of his ineptitude. Still this procession of the gods along the hours of the day has great interest for the Vedic ritual and the explanation of the gods themselves. Touches of it appear in the hymns themselves, as when the Rig-Veda² groups very neatly the gods of the morning:

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² Nighanṭu 5. 4–6.

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³ *Cf.* Nirukta 12. 1. Bṛhaddevatā 2. 7 *ff.*

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⁴ See below, p. 112.

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² 1. 157. 1.

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"Agni awoke upon the earth, and Sūrya riseth;
Broad gleaming Dawn hath shone in brilliance.
The Açvins twain have yoked their car to travel.
God Savitar hath roused the world in every place."

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There is another, more permanent traditional Hindu division of the gods which arranges them in three classes, mostly of eleven each, according to their place or habitat in nature or the cosmos, that is, in sky, mid-air, and earth. The classification is first made in Rig-Veda 1. 139. 11: to some extent it remains good ever after. This topography of nature has a strong hold on the early religion: times without end the later Vedic texts insist that Agni, "Fire" belongs to, or is typical of the earth; Vāta or Vāyu, "Wind," of the mid-air, and Sūrya, "Sun," of the sky.¹ So far it is the philosophy of the obvious. They continue cleverly along that line in the following arrangement. I state only the more important members of each class:

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¹ See below, p. 112.

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¹ *Cf.* Brihaddevatā 1. 5 *ff.*

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Celestial gods: Dyaus or Dyaush Pitar ("Sky" or "Father Sky"), Varuna, Mitra, Sūrya and the Ādityas, Savitar, Pūshan, Vishnu, Ushas, and the Açvins.²

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² See the index at the end of this book for these and most of the following gods.

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Atmospheric gods: Vāta or Vāyu ("Wind") Indra, Parjanya, Rudra, and the Maruts.

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Terrestrial gods: Prithivī ("Earth"), Agni, and Soma.

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This threefold division, in order to be consistent, would have to be carried on to the end, so as to include all the gods. As a matter of fact it is uncertain in many places, even when carried no farther. We are not so certain as are the Hindus that Indra, for instance, is a god of the mid-air,³ even though we must admire this, on the whole successful, appreciation of the place in nature that belongs to a goodly proportion of the chief gods.

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³ See below, p. 173.

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There are yet other possibilities which need not be mentioned, because we shall not follow their lead. Our own course, doubtless open to some objection, will be eclectic. We shall call up the more important Vedic gods under such various points of view as will bring out some one salient quality—which does not say that they may not have other qualities of great interest. Thus the chronological element must remain immensely important. The chronology of the gods must influence to some extent our judgment of this ancient religion of the Veda. The old prehistoric gods that have been imported by the Aryas into India, no matter how much they have been Hinduised, will necessarily have characteristics of their own.

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Next come the gods which have been coined in hot haste out of the phenomena of nature in a glowing subtropical climate, or have been imbued anew with the vitality of India's imposing nature. These have not had time to forget their own origin—they are, as I have called them, the gods of arrested personification or arrested anthropomorphism. They are the beacon lights of Vedic religion, of Comparative Mythology, and of the Science of Religion. They are the rare guides and philosophers on this labyrinthine and rocky road; they have made the Veda the training-school of the study of religion. Since they show in a given number of cases just what has taken place, they point the way when the light becomes hazy.

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Again, it is still as true as ever that a large number of the gods, whether early or late, are nature-gods whose origin, we regret to say, has been somewhat obscured by later processes. They again make up for the student of the Veda a class, the most important as well as the most difficult theme of investigation. Every nation's mythology must contain gods of this class. They bring with them problems that will never be dismissed until they are finally answered—and that, paradoxically, may never be. I have in mind gods like Varuna, Indra, and the Açvins. To some Vedic scholars it seems without doubt begging the question to speak of nature-gods in cases when we do not know for certain what was the natural object that was personified. No one can say at this time that the origin of either Varuna, Indra, or the Açvins has been definitely settled. Yet, for my part I confess to that faith, because I remember that such uncertainty represents in truth the normal result of mythologic development. As a rule, a nature-god does not remain transparent for ever: the opposite happens far more frequently, as may be seen, again and again, in Hellenic or Teutonic mythology. Really durable myths are, as a rule, mixed myths, and, therefore, more or less obscure myths. A certain amount of the complications and entanglements of human life must be imported into mythology before it becomes mythology. Otherwise it remains philosophy, primitive cosmic philosophy, or primitive empirical natural science.

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Let me paraphrase a statement made some years ago in a learned journal.¹ Mythological investigation must draw a sharp line between the primary attributes of a mythic personage which are the cause of the personification, and the attributes and events which are assigned to him or her, and are supposed to happen after the personification had been completed. Zeus, as we all know, originally meant "sky," and Zeus pater was the personified "Father Sky," contrasted with "Mother Earth." But it would be foolish to search for these primary qualities of Zeus or the other Greek gods in a play of Euripides, where the gods are afflicted with all the passions and weaknesses of mortal men. Yet he who refuses to mythologise on the basis of Euripides' treatment need not therefore be sceptical about the naturalistic origin of most of the Greek gods; he may be willing at the right time, and in the right stage of the history of any myth, to point out the physical factors or the physical events which gave it a start. But to be present at the right time, that is not always so easy.

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¹ *Journal of the American Oriental Society*, vol. xv., pp. 185, 186.

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Further, there are gods in the Veda—not too many in number—about whose origin we can determine nothing that is either definite or helpful. Either these gods have been obscured totally by later events in their natural history, or they are derived from aboriginal tribes or other foreign sources about which we know nothing at all.

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Keeping in mind this idea of genesis, we might divide the gods into three classes: transparent, translucent, and opaque gods. And being by nature and occupation philosophically inclined, plagued by an incontinent desire to find last causes, I shall follow the lead of these my suggestions, and describe the gods from the point of view of their origin and the *rationale* of their being under five heads:

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1. Prehistoric gods, whether their origin be clear or obscure.

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2. Transparent, half-personified gods, who are at the same time nature objects and mythic persons.

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3. Translucent gods, who impose upon the investigator the theory of their origin in nature.

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4. Opaque gods, who refuse to reveal their origins.

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5. To these may be added, as a fifth class, the abstract or symbolic gods who embody an action, a wish, or a fear in the shape of a good or evil divinity, god, or demon. Of this class our fifth lecture will furnish abundant illustration.¹

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¹ See also my essay, *The Symbolic Gods*, in *Studies in Honor of B. L. Gildersleeve*, p. 37 *ff.*

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Fortunately it does not fall within the province of these lectures to exhaust the long-drawn and monotonous theme of Vedic mythology, or to establish definitely the precise origin of all the gods. My object is to sketch the motives and principles that underlie the remarkable chain of religious ideas that leads from the ritual worship of the great nature-gods of the Rig-Veda to the high theosophy of the Upanishads. Mythology pervades this development to a very great extent, so that we must understand its principles. But a mythic figure more or less cannot materially change the picture, when once we know how mythic figures in general are fabricated, and then overlaid with religious feeling and advancing religious thought. The particular character of the individual god soon becomes unimportant. One of the most remarkable facts in the religion of the Veda, when carried to its legitimate conclusion, is, that these multiple gods really vanish in the end, after they have contributed their individual attributes to the great idea of unity, of oneness at the root of the universe. This is the very negation of mythology and Pantheons; of sacrificial hocus-pocus and poetic fable. And when the twilight has engulfed these gods, then, and not until then, in India as elsewhere, do real religion and real philosophy begin.

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