The Religions of India c12.3

c12.3

It has been shown that these gods, earthly in habitation, absorbed the powers of the older and physically higher divinities. The ideas that clustered about the latter were transferred to the former. The altar-fire, Agni, is at once earth-fire, lightning, and sun. The drink soma is identified with the heavenly drink that refreshes the earth, and from its color is taken at last to be the terrestrial form of its aqueous prototype, the moon, which is not only yellow, but even goes through cloud-meshes just as soma goes through the sieve, with all the other points of comparison that priestly ingenuity can devise.