The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c11.s1: § 1. The Avesta
The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c11.s1
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§ 1. The Avesta
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While the literary evidences for Vedic religion are of quite exceptional value and importance, it must be admitted that of other material for realizing the mode in which the gods were conceived there is none available :¹ we have not the statues and other forms of representation, such as paintings, coins, seals, statuettes, &c., which are of such value in the case of Greek religion. No Indian art products or coins of the early Vedic period have been discovered, and that any should so be discovered is most improbable. On the other hand, great value attaches to the Avesta as a source for the understanding of Vedic religion. The close similarity in form of the Avestan language and the Vedic is beyond all doubt : certain changes in sounds² make indeed an apparent external divergence, but the vocabulary, the formation of words, and the syntax correspond with much exactitude, and, what is even more important, the verses of the Avesta often breathe the same religious spirit as those of the Rigveda. The similarity of religious views in the pre-Zoroastrian period must have been of the most close and striking type : the prose formulae of the Veda no less than the verses show a profound likeness of form and content, and the practical identity of modes of thought between Iran and India is sufficiently indicated by the striking parallelism between the form of parts of the Buddhist canon and the Iranian literature. The extraordinary similarity of view as of speech, indeed, makes it hard to believe in any early separation of these two branches of the Indo-European family, and suggests that they must have continued to be in close touch with one another until a comparatively late period, when the advance of the Vedic section towards India interposed difficulties of communication between them and the Iranian tribes, and gave a decisive turn to divergences of view which were beginning to form themselves in the Aryan community. The divergence from the common religion of the still undivided Aryans is clearly far greater in the case of the Avesta : there is no good ground to doubt that its present form is the result of the definite individuality of Zoroaster at a comparatively late date,³ though doubtless he merely brought to a head tendencies which had been developing before his time. Under that change much of the old Aryan mythology disappeared or was deeply altered, and it is, therefore, the more remarkable that so much similarity should remain.
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¹ Jouveau-Dubreuil’s *Vedic Antiquities* affords nothing of more than speculative value; see also Marshall, CHI. i. 616 as to the alleged burial mounds of Lauriyā Nandangarh; *Arch. Survey of India Rep.* 1904–5, pp. 38 ff.
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² Exaggerated in the ordinary transcription of the Avestan sounds, which is now under revision by Wackernagel and others; Andreas, GN. 1909, pp. 42 ff.; 1911, pp. 1 ff.; cf. Bartholomae, VOJ. xxiv. 129 ff.
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³ For a theory of Israelite influence, see Pettazzoni, *La Religione di Zarathustra*, pp. 82 ff., and a criticism by Keith, JHS. xli. 279 f.; F. W. Thomas (JRAS. 1916, p. 364) suggests that Asura came from Assyria and that Zoroastrianism is a moralizing Assyrian creed; the difficulty is to find its Assyrian parallel.
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The figure of Ahura Mazdāh cannot possibly¹ be dissociated from Varuṇa who bears the epithet Asura, the term applied to other Vedic gods, while in the later Saṁhitās the Asuras have become the foes of the gods. Like Ahura, Varuṇa is the lord of holy order, Ṛta, which corresponds to the Avestan Aša : he is closely united with Mitra, as Ahura with Mithra, the sun-god : he is the chief of the Ādityas as deities of light, as Ahura is connected with the Ameša Spentas,² who like the Ādityas are not at first fixed in number : Varuṇa guards the sun from falling and makes it a path wherein to wander along the heaven, as Ahura keeps the earth from falling and provides the sun with a pathway. But, apart from these coincidences, the mere moral grandeur of both deities can only be explained by a common origin : the history of Varuṇa in India is that of moral elevation which gradually disappears, and the god sinks to a mere god of the waters, of quite secondary importance. It is inconceivable that this fact should be explained in any other way than that as a god he was brought to India, when under less favourable circumstances his moral quality evaporated. This theory, moreover, renders it easy to understand the success of the Zoroastrian faith and its choice of Ahura as the great and only god in the proper sense of the term : it was not a creation, but a purification of a conception existing among the people of Iran. The loss of the name Varuṇa is natural enough, and it is now probable that we actually have a record of the period when Varuṇa and Mitra were Aryan or Iranian gods in the list of the gods of Mitanni, referred to above. The same list contains the name of Indra, and supports the view that this deity was Aryan, for the same conclusion is irresistibly suggested by the fact that the Avesta knows a demon Indra, and a genius of victory whose name Verethraghna is unmistakably equivalent to Vṛtrahan, the epithet *par excellence* of Indra, as slayer of Vṛtra his greatest foe.³ We do not know the precise steps of the process by which Indra fell from honour among the Iranians : there was, however, an obvious incompatibility of temper between the moral and stately Varuṇa and the impetuous war god Indra, which comes out even in the Rigveda, but in India there was no religious reformation to regard Indra as the inferior deity and reduce him to the rank of a demon.
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¹ Hillebrandt (*Ved. Myth.* iii. 11) denied this, but the argument is incredible; cf. Oldenberg, ZDMG. l. 48; Meyer, *Gesch. des Alt.*³ I. ii. pp. 913, 921.
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² See B. Geiger, *Die Ameša Spentas* (Wien, 1916). The š really is a mere misrepresentation, Andreas and Wackernagel, GN. 1911, p. 3, n. 1; contrast Bartholomae, VOJ. xxiv. 173.
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³ Oldenberg, JRAS. 1909, pp. 1090–5; Moulton, *Early Zoroastrianism*, p. 69. The theory that the Iranian genius is the genuine old Sondergott of War, and Vṛtra an Indian creation, through a misunderstanding of the term 'assault repelling', is quite unacceptable. The old Armenian deity Vahagn defeats dragons; Hillebrandt, *Ved. Myth.* iii. 188 f.
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The identity of Ahura and Varuṇa lends great probability to the identification of the Ameša Spenta and the Ādityas. It is true that no great stress can be laid on the number seven, which is not certainly primitive and may be ethnic in significance, but it is a reasonable view that the highly etherialized and spiritualized conceptions of the Ameša Spenta are merely the reflex of the more substantial though still abstract deities, the Ādityas. It must be noted that in India also these gods are not in essence personifications of nature, but, as their names denote, represent activities of human life, and the Iranian development in their case is a natural parallel to the refinement of the character of Asura into something far above the average god; moreover Bhaga, the giver of good things, one of the Ādityas, bears a name which in Iranian as Bagha denotes a god in general. The identity of Mitra with Mithra is patent and undeniable, Iran seems to have known Dyaus,¹ and there are as clear identities in minor figures such as that of Apāṁ Napāt, and Apãm Napāt, Gandharva and Gandarewa, Kṛçānu and Keresāni, both of whom appear in connexion with the Soma, Vāyu and Vayu, a genius of air, Trita Āptya, and the two forms, Thrita and Āthwya. The Avesta and Rigveda agree in the terms Yātu and Druj (Druh) as applied to evil spirits. Still more interesting is the parallelism of Yama, son of Vivasvant, the first of men and ruler of paradise, with Yima, son of Vīvaṅhvant. The waters and plants as deities are invoked by both.
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¹ Herodotos (i. 131) asserts that the Persians called the whole circle of the heaven Zeus, probably not an allusion to Ahura; Spiegel, *Eran. Alt.* ii. 15; von Schroeder, *Arische Religion*, ii. 338 ff.; Moulton, *Early Zoroastrianism*, pp. 391f. We need not seek to find the actual Iranian name in Herodotos, who naturally uses the Greek term.
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Quite as striking are the similarities in the cult. In both India and Iran a priest called Hotṛ or Zaotar must originally have been the chief performer, the name denoting the act of offering the libation. The fire cult produced the Atharvan priest of India, the Āthravan of Iran, though Agni seems a specifically Indian development,² a fact which explains perhaps why he does not appear with Mitra and Varuṇa, Indra and the Nāsatyas in the list of gods of the Mitanni. The sacrifice bears the same name Yajña and Yasna respectively, and many other words used in the ritual correspond. More important still is the fact that the Soma is celebrated by the singers in both lands as the plant that grows on the mountains, watered by the rain of heaven, and brought by the eagle. It was in both lands pressed, and the juice passed through a sieve and then mixed with milk. But the deposition of Indra, who in India is the Soma drinker *par excellence*, from that place of honour in Iran, has resulted in the alteration of the old ritual of the drinking of the Soma by the god and then by the priests.³ Both peoples too at one time spread a strew, Barhis or Baresman, for the god to sit upon when he came to receive their offerings, and the old term spread (*stereta*) was preserved by the Iranians even after they had ceased altogether to conceive of the idea of the god coming to seat himself at the sacrifice. In both countries the pious offerer is styled the man who has spread the strew; in both again the service of praise consisted in large measure of hymns, whose close similarity of language and thought has already been noted.
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² Moulton, *Early Zoroastrianism*, pp. 70, 71.
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³ Moulton (op. cit., pp. 71–3) adopts the view that the opinion of Zoroaster was definitely hostile to Haoma, while in the West the original intoxicating plant was replaced by a harmless one, which was not drunk.
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The similarity of the concept of moral order, Ṛta or Aša, has been also noted: the names of the Mitanni kings afford to us curiously enough the proof that the term Arta was known in the fourteenth century B.C. at the latest. The form Arta is of special interest as it does not show the sound change of the Avesta, if indeed that be real and not a mere mistranscription; it may of course have belonged to the Iranian of pre-Avestan date, or it may have been an Aryan dialectical form, but at any rate the vitality and age of the idea are thus early established. Moreover, the idea of Ṛta is one which, like the moral elevation of Varuṇa, has no future history in India, pointing irresistibly to the view that it was not an Indian creation, but an inheritance which did not long survive its new milieu.
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Another conception, of minor importance, but of interest, which survived in the Avesta, is the conception of thirty-three gods. The origin of the idea is wholly unknown in the Rigveda, where neither for eleven nor for thirty-three is any explanation available, and this points to its great antiquity. But beyond this we cannot go: the effort of Hopkins¹ to evolve the number eleven from a primitive ten, and to find a circle of ten gods known to India, Greece, and Teutonic mythology must be regarded as unsuccessful: the Greek number is not very early, and is twelve, and no legitimate means of reducing it to ten is known, and even twelve is not Homeric, while the Teutonic circle of twelve is so late as to be certainly no more than a mere borrowing.²
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¹ *Oriental Studies*, pp. 153, 154.
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² Golther, *German. Myth.*, p. 200; for Greece, see Farnell, *Cults of the Greek States*, i. 84, 85; cf. also Keith, *JRAS.* 1916, pp. 350-6.
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The curious phenomenon that in Iran the gods of India appear as demons, while in India the Asuras as demons are contrasted with the great Ahura Mazdāh, has naturally given rise to much discussion: the simplest view, that the divergence of terminology arose directly from a religious split among the tribes caused by the Zoroastrian reforms which led to the differentiation of the two as Indian and Iranian, is now usually admitted not to be tenable; but the terminology has been thought to reflect hostile conflicts between Iranians and Indians in times after the two nations had developed separate lives.³ For this view we would have good authority if we could accept the identification⁴ of a mysterious Gaotema who is found in the Yašt,¹ and who was, it has been asserted, none other than Gautama Buddha. The identification, however, rests merely on the similarity of name, and this being the case, and the name being an old Indian one, it is perfectly clear that it should not be used for serious argument.² Still less seriously can we take the suggestion that the Buddhist religion was really suggested to the Buddha from an outside source, and that not Aryan. The effort³ to show that Buddhism was Tibetan in origin, and the Buddha a Mongolian of Gūrkha type, by such evidence as that of the form of the Stūpa, and the alleged Tibetan affinities of the Vajjis or Licchavis, or the equation of Çākya with non-Aryan⁴ Scyths, and the prevalence of Mongolian feature types on Barhut and Sanchī sculptures, is wholly fantastic, and certainly affords no reason to see any close intercourse with Iran in any early period. Of such intercourse the Vedic literature affords no clear evidence at all: the most that can be said is that the energy with which the fire cult was practised in the north according to the testimony of the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa may be accounted for by the proximity of the north-west to Iran, and the difference between the two forms of fire cult is so great as to render even this conclusion uncertain and precarious.
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³ See below, Part II, Chap. 15, § 1.
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⁴ Moulton, *Early Zoroastrianism*, p. 28. His further suggestion that the demons Indra, Saurva (= Çarva), and Nāoṅhaithya are due to this later contact of Indra and Iran is quite untenable. On an alleged Zoroastrian period of Indian
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¹ xiii. 16.
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² Keith, JRAS. 1915, p. 798.
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³ Rawlinson, JBRAS. xxiii. 223, 224; Vincent Smith, IA. xxxii. 234; *Oxford Hist. of India*, pp. 47 ff. See B. C. Law, *Kṣatriya Tribes of Ancient India*, pp. 25 ff.
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⁴ Even Minns (*Scythians and Greeks*, pp. 85 ff.) has been misled into taking history, see Keith, JRAS. 1916, pp. 138 ff., and cf. the articles in the *Modern Review* (1916), xix. 373 ff., 490 ff., 597 ff. as Mongolian practices which are Iranian and nomadic, this tendency reaching the absurdity of deriving Papaios = Zeus (Herodotos, iv. 59) from Uralo-Altaic *baba*, ignoring Phrygian Papas.
Linked texts (3)
- Ṛgvedasaṃhitā — Sanskrit
- Yašt — Avestan
- Śatapathabrāhmaṇa — Yājñavalkya & Śāṇḍilya (Vedic teacher), Sanskrit