The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c7.s1.1

c7.s1.1

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.