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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c13.s1: § 1. Nature Gods and Abstract Deities

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c13.s1

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Contents

§ 1. Nature Gods and Abstract Deities

(a) Anthropomorphism

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ALREADY in the period of Indo-European unity there had in all probability arisen the conception of anthropomorphic deities of the sky, such as Dyaus, Mitra, or the Açvins, and it is therefore only natural that in the main the high gods of the Rigveda should be essentially conceived as human, as men of supernatural power, and free from death, but still as subject to birth and akin in their family relation to men. But, though it would be wrong to ignore the anthropomorphic¹ character of the gods, the Vedic pantheon has none of the clear cut figures of the Greek, and unlike the Greek deities it is seldom difficult to doubt that the anthropomorphic forms but faintly veil phenomena of nature. The difference is so striking that it is impossible to ascribe it to a mere difference between the records of the two religions, the secular and romantic poetry of Homer on the one hand, and the formal hymns used in the sacrifice of the Rigveda on the other. It is most probable that much of the vagueness of the physical nature of the Greek gods and goddesses is due to their origin either from direct borrowing from the Aegean people of Greece, or from contamination with Aegean deities.² In the process of amalgamation of beliefs it is scarcely surprising that the outlines of the characters of the gods should have been hopelessly blurred in comparison with the much clearer and more transparent figures of the Vedic hymns.

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¹ Arbman's theory (*Rudra*, pp. 4 ff.) that the popular religion had far more fully personalized gods is clearly untenable, and contradicts all that we know of primitive religion. What is true is that the Vedic texts show both imperfect anthropomorphism and contamination of deities.

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² Cf. Hall, PSBA. xxxi. 164 ff.; Evans, *JHS.* xxi. 161 ff. See also Farnell, *Greece and Babylon*, pp. 72 ff. for Hellenic anthropomorphism. Cf. Cook, *Zeus*, i. 9 ff.; Helm, *Altgerm. Rel.* i. 186 f., 194 ff.; Fox, *Greek and Roman Mythology*, p. xlviii; MacCulloch, *Celtic Mythology*, pp. 132 f.

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The degree of anthropomorphism exhibited by the Vedic deities is extremely variable. In some cases the active element is constantly present, and the view taken may be set down as almost animatistic: the waters are indeed goddesses, but they are also wholesome to drink; the goddess Dawn bares her bosom like a beautiful maiden, but there is comparison here rather than identity, and, if in some cases the goddess seems to be considered as one who appears morn after morn to men, in others each separate dawn is a fresh divinity. Sūrya, the sun, by his rising is born as the child of the sky; the constant presence of the actual deity prevents any real development of anthropomorphism. The same consideration affects Agni, who never appears as a god disconnected from his element of fire: when he is hidden in the waters or in the clouds, it is as fire: as messenger of men he is the fire of the sacrifice flaming up to heaven to bring gods and men together. But the difficulties of this view were clearly felt in connexion with the question of the innumerable fires of earth and their relation to the god. Strictly speaking he must be present in each, and this view is often taken, but there appears also the conception that in some degree the god is free from the element and able to come to it, not merely to be manifested in it when it is produced. The evidence for this view is, however, it is important to note, late: in the Rigveda it is only suggested by the doubtful¹ phrase in a late hymn, in which Agni when enkindled at the sacrifice is said to sit down as priest coming to his own home, a conception based on the idea of the relation of the spirit of man to the spirit world to which he fares on death. In the ceremony of the piling of the fire altar, when the flame is lighted, Agni is invoked in the Yajurveda² to come from the furthest distance, and it is possible that in the ritual,³ when at the kindling of the fire a horse is brought up to the place of kindling, it is due to the desire to induce Agni through his presence in his symbol to draw near to and enter the element which has been kindled. The contrast with the figure of Agni in later literature such as the epic is marked: in the epic the gods have long ceased to be nearly as closely connected with their natural bases as in the Rigveda, and Agni can figure as the main personage in tales which never had any relation to the fire as an element.

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¹ RV. x. 12. 1; Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², p. 44 (but see p. 529, n. 2).

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² Weber, *Ind. Stud.* xiii. 227.

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³ ÇB. ii. 1. 4. 17.

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Indra, on the other hand, is a god who has in considerable measure⁴ been emancipated from his connexion with the phenomena which produced the conception, primarily in all probability the thunderstorm, which brings down the rain to earth, one of the greatest of India's natural phenomena. It is possible enough that this freedom from strict connexion with nature is due to the difference of the elemental conception: the sun, the dawn, the waters, and fire are things ever seen, and the names bring back to the poet at once their essential character, but in the case of Indra the meaning of his appellation was as obscure to the Vedic poet as it is to us. Moreover, the fierce nature of Indra made him suited to be the war god of the conquering Aryans, and afforded thus a point of departure permitting of the development of other than nature myths. A similar contrast is seen in Germany between the character of the sun and the storm god.

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The same consideration applies in even stronger degree to Mitra and Varuṇa: the identity of Mitra with the sun is strongly supported, but, whereas the personality of Sūrya remains, like that of the Greek Helios, of the most shadowy character, and Sūrya is always the material sun, Mitra even in the Avesta is far from chained to his natural basis: he comes into view over the mountain of sunrise, it is said, before the sun, and in the Rigveda his connexion with the sun can only be made certain by the parallelism of the Avesta, where he has distinct solar features: like Varuṇa he is a celestial god who watches over men and stirs them with his speech to activity, while he supports heaven and earth. Varuṇa is even more free from traces of nature, so that it remains yet doubtful whether that nature was really as is most probable the sky: his essential feature has nothing necessarily connected with his natural background: he is the lord of holy order, the watcher of men, whose vigilance nothing can escape. The Açvins also have lost any clear trace of their origin in nature: whatever that was, they are two radiant youths who travel in their chariot across the sky, and above all bring aid to men in trouble.

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The older school of mythology felt bound to seek for and find the natural background to all the myths of the Açvins:¹ the effort was doubtless futile, for, when once the gods attained, by whatever means and from whatever cause, the character of saviours of men, any cultural development and any feat of man in which he deemed himself preserved by divine guidance and assistance could be ascribed to the gods. Thus there could be developed myths which in no conceivable way were ever nature myths; there are also myths of origins, philosophical and allegorical myths, and myths of the hereafter, while again many nature myths are transformed by a poetic fancy, which has but little connexion with the original groundwork. The waters as we have seen are goddesses who do not free themselves from the element, but there exist figures which have been set free, the Apsarases: in the Rigveda² we find that they can be treated exactly like the waters and invoked to mix with the Soma, but their normal aspect is that of water maidens, who can freely leave their element and unite with mortal men, showing traits which render them the sisters of the Germanic swan maidens, and similar figures in many other religions. In these love adventures, it would surely be useless to find nature mythology.

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Soma again in the Rigveda and later is never fully anthropomorphic, though in the Avesta he appears to the priest in the form of a man of extreme beauty, but an interesting myth of the Rigveda³ recounts the bringing down of Soma from the sky to Indra: the bird which bears down the drink is detected by the archer Kṛçānu who guards the Soma, and who shoots an arrow at it, failing to kill it but knocking off a feather: in this episode it is clearly an error to seek to explain mythically the item of the shot of the archer: we have, introduced from ordinary life, a natural and simple motive.¹ Such intermixture of extraneous conceptions is specially frequent in connexion with sacrificial rites: when the god Rudra appears as a great dark man to Nābhānediṣṭha at the place of sacrifice, and demands as his share all that is left over from the offering to other gods, which has just been performed,² it is perfectly clear that we are dealing with a free invention of the priestly fancy.

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⁴ Cf., e. g., Rhys, *Celtic Heathendom*, p. 293, who thinks he might be deemed a deified man, a type of culture hero.

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¹ See, e. g., Max Müller (*Beitr. zu einer wiss. Myth.* ii. 150 ff.) on the legend of the quail (*vartikā*) saved from the wolf.

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² ix. 78. 3.

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³ iv. 26 and 27.

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¹ Bloomfield, JAOS. xvi. 1–24.

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² AB. v. 14.

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One further function of the mythical faculty is of importance in regard to the nature gods. It was a natural conception which transferred to heaven the relations of men, and set beside each god a goddess to be his wife, even as on earth each Indian had one wife or more to share his home. The naïve simplicity³ of the practice, which may have been helped by the prevailing conception of the sky as father, and earth as mother, reveals itself in the characteristic manner in which the names of the goddesses of this class are formed, being derived directly from their husbands' names by the use of a feminine termination. Indrāṇī, for example, the wife of Indra, has no myth of nature to explain her existence: she is quite different in this regard from the goddess Dawn, who is a natural phenomenon. The creation of such types led to further developments in myth, undermining natural mythology. One of the most obscure hymns of the Rigveda⁴ tells us of a dispute between Indra and Indrāṇī over a being styled Vṛṣākapi, 'male ape'; to seek in it a naturalistic interpretation is rendered from the outset almost hopeless when we recognize that the chief figure in the dispute, the angry Indrāṇī, is clearly not a nature personification in any sense. It must, however, be admitted that this field of myth was little exploited in the literature left to us: it is also of interest to note that the pale figure of Dione, beside Zeus, suggests that the process which produced Indrāṇī and her fellows was already in working in the Indo-European period.⁵

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³ It is vastly more developed in the epic; Hopkins, *Epic Myth.*, pp. 61 ff.

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⁴ RV. x. 86; von Bradke, ZDMG. xlvi. 465; Bloomfield, *ibid.* xlviii. 541 ff.; Geldner, *Ved. Stud.* ii. 109; Winternitz, VOJ. xxiii. 137; Keith, *JRAS.* 1911, p. 1005; Hillebrandt, *Ved. Myth.* iii. 278, n. 2; Charpentier, *Die Suparṇasage*, pp. 100–2; Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², pp. 166 ff.

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⁵ Kretschmer, *Gesch. der griech. Sprache*, p. 91. Cf. perhaps Freyr and Freyja, Fjörgynn and Fjörgyn.

(b) Theriomorphism and the Worship of Animals

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While most of the Vedic nature deities are normally conceived as anthropomorphic, there did not prevail any rigid exclusion of theriomorphic conceptions of the deities. It is often asserted, even by Oldenberg,⁶ that in earlier periods of religion theriomorphic conceptions were more frequent than anthropomorphic, but the proof for such a theory seems to be wholly lacking.

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⁶ *Rel. des Veda*², pp. 39, 67. Cf. Helm, *Altgerm. Rel.* i. 202 ff., who also insists (p. 18) that the primitive apperception sees the soul in a beast form before a human form, following the views of Wundt (*Elemente der Völkerpsychologie*, pp. 173 ff.); for a good criticism, see van Gennep, *L'état actuel du problème totémique*, pp. 99 ff.

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That the storm god should be conceived in human form appears to be as natural and as primitive as that he should be ascribed an animal form, unless indeed we are to be asked to believe that religious conceptions of animal gods were formed before the development of man as such. Apart, however, from theories such as these, there can be no question of the predominance of anthropomorphism in the Rigveda, while at the same time theriomorphism is not unknown, a condition which accords well with the observed fact that the distinction of man and beast is never drawn by early peoples with the definite precision of modern feeling. Two deities are recorded for us in animal form only, the one-footed goat, Aja Ekapād, and the serpent of the deep, Ahi Budhnya: it is not likely that either is in origin an animal deity: the one-footed goat may be the lightning flash that descends to earth in a single streak: the serpent has clear mythological meaning in its application to Vṛtra, the demon who is defeated by Indra, and who holds back the waters of the clouds which are desired. The mother of the Maruts, gods of the storm wind, is called the dappled cow, which deems to have been felt as a description of the clouds whence sprang the rain. The Ādityas themselves, sons of Aditi, herself either a personification of freedom, or an abstraction derived from their name, are also cow-born, reflecting perhaps—not probably—a conception of the birth of the luminaries from a celestial cow.¹ The sacrificial food is personified as early in the Rigveda as a lady with hands full of butter, but she is also styled a cow, and in the ritual ² the cow is addressed with the words, ‘Come, o Iḍā, o Aditi.’ Agni is often conceived of as a horse, and Indra as a bull. The clouds when the rain is brought down are normally and usually styled the cows. Saraṇyū according to an old tradition becomes a mare and in that condition brings forth the two Açvins.

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¹ Cf. AV. viii. 9. 1, where the two calves of Virāj may be sun and moon, children of dawn.

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² Bergaigne, *Rel. Véd.* i. 325.

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Animals also figure in the entourage of the gods, and in this case it is only fair to allow for the natural tendency to assimilate gods to men and to give them animal followers. The goddess Saramā, who in dog shape finds for Indra the cows, and who has been explained as a wind-spirit, parallel to Hermes,³ need not be assumed to be more than a copy of the ordinary facts of life on earth. The horses of the gods are likewise transferred from the human to the divine sphere. In other cases, however, it is quite possible to suspect that there lies beneath an animal as companion of the god a trace of the god himself. The eagle brings the Soma down to Indra, but already in the Rigveda there is a variant form of the myth which indicates that the Soma was obtained by Indra in the form of an eagle,⁴ and, if we interpret the myth in the form of the bringing down to earth of the generous moisture by the action of the thunder storm and the descent of the rain amid lightning, it becomes tempting to assume that the eagle was none other throughout than the god Indra. Pūṣan, again, has a team of goats, but we find that in the Rigveda he is a knower of paths, while at the horse sacrifice a goat is killed to precede the horse, as it seems, to the world of death : ¹ a goat too is slaughtered at the ceremony of the burning of the dead : ² hence it is a conjecture not without plausibility that the goat was a form of Pūṣan, as the sure-footed animal which could wander with safety over distant and difficult ways. The Açvins, again, are horsemen as their name denotes, and they are never described as actual horses : yet their mother according to an old, though not Rigvedic, tradition,³ is a mare, and it is a legitimate hypothesis, though one wholly incapable of proof, that once they were conceived as in horse shape as well as in human shape ; in yet other religions they may have been conceived as in the shape of birds. In the case of Indra and the eagle some confirmation is lent by the Bahram Yašt ⁴ of the Avesta in which we learn of Verethraghna flying to Zoroaster in the form of the bird Vāraghna, swiftest of all birds. But these cases of theriomorphism must be sharply distinguished from those of the birds of omen, which are styled messengers of the Fathers or of Yama : ⁵ the birds themselves were, we need not doubt, quasi-deities in their own right before they were reduced to the rank of messengers, and we need not suppose that their position as givers of omens is due to their being regarded as embodiments of souls of the dead.⁶ The horse Açvins, if they ever existed, were not divine horses, but theriomorphic conceptions of nature powers.⁷

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³ Cf. Oertel, *Stud. zur vergl. Lit.* viii (1908), 124.

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⁴ RV. x. 99. 8; Bloomfield, JAOS. xvi. 8; Kuhn, *Herabkunft des Feuers*, p. 144. The view that the bird is Viṣṇu (Johannson, *Solfågeln i Indien*, p. 21; Charpentier, *Die Suparṇasage*, pp. 324 ff.) is less plausible. Sometimes the Soma is the eagle.

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¹ RV. i. 162. 2–4.

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² RV. x. 16. 4.

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³ RV. x. 17. 2 as rendered by Sāyaṇa with Yāska, Nir. xii. 10. Cf. Lanman, *Sanskrit Reader*, p. 381 ; Weber, *Ind. Stud.* xvii. 310 ; Oldenberg, *Ṛgveda-Noten*, ii. 217 ; Bloomfield, *JAOS.* xv. 185.

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⁴ Cf. Carnoy, *Iranian Mythology*, pp. 272 ff.

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⁵ RV. ii. 42. 2 ; x. 165 ; AV. vi. 27–9 ; xi. 2. 2, 11 ; TA. iv. 28 ; Kauç. cxxix; cf. the jackal, HGS. i. 16. 19.

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⁶ See Arbman, *Rudra*, pp. 255 ff.

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⁷ See Farnell's protest against prevalent errors as to animal forms (*Greece and Babylon*, pp. 55 ff., 70 ff. ; *Greek Hero Cults*, pp. 177, 214, 215).

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In comparison with the normal anthropomorphic conceptions of the deity and the less frequent theriomorphic, there are comparatively few instances in Vedic worship of the direct and wholly animatistic ⁸ veneration of natural objects. The most obvious is the cult of the snakes, which is not, however, Rigvedic, but probably borrowed from the aboriginal population, and occasional propitiation of ants, moles, &c.

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⁸ Marett, *Threshold of Religion*, pp. 15, 16, 20 ; Goblet d'Alviella, *Croyances*, ii. 120.

(c) Animatism, Sondergötter, and Abstract Deities

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Beside the concrete figures of the great nature gods with their extended spheres of action, there stand deities with definitely limited functions, though also nature powers. Of such deities we have good examples in the Kṣetrasya Pati and Vāstoṣpati, who appear in the Rigveda itself. These are, of course, no abstract deities; they are, the one, the spirit who dwells in the field, the other, the spirit who has his abode in the house, and neither conception can be asserted with any plausibility to be later than the period of the growth of belief in the great gods. More concrete still are such cases as Sītā, the furrow, and Urvarā, the field. It is significant of the great development of personification later that in the Rāmāyaṇa Sītā is predominantly a mortal woman, wife of Rāma, and daughter of Janaka. Traces, indeed, remain of her former divinity, for the legend tells that hers was no normal birth, but she sprang to life from the furrow when her father was ploughing, and, at the end, when she determines by a conclusive proof to show to Rāma and his court that her purity had suffered nothing at the hands of Rāvaṇa during her enforced abode in the palace of her captor, her prayer to the goddess Earth is answered by the appearance of the deity, who takes her into her bosom.¹ Not essentially different from these instances are the prayers addressed and the reverence paid by the warrior to his weapons, the chariot, the arrow, and the drum, by the ploughman to the ploughshare, and by the dicer to his dice. Plants and trees are sometimes conceived in this way, but, as all over the world, tree spirits, like water nymphs, tend to become less closely connected with their material embodiment and to pass over into anthropomorphic form.

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¹ Cf. H. Jacobi, *Das Rāmāyaṇa*, p. 130; Hopkins, *Epic Myth.*, p. 12.

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We find also deities of very limited activity, who serve but one definite purpose. Thus in the Atharvaveda ² the spirit Uttuda is invoked to stir up a damsel to love, while even in the Rigveda ³ it is possible that Nivartana is felt as a divine power which moves the cows when departed to return to their place. These instances correspond closely with the Sondergötter ⁴ of Usener evidenced by the Indigitamenta in Rome, and the Lithuanian spirits presiding over all sorts of departments of nature and human activity. It is argued by Usener that the great nature deities are derived from such special deities, and doubtless there is no difficulty on conceiving the growth of such divinities to a more important status. The claim, however, of general derivation is clearly untenable. There is much more force in the view which sees in these Sondergötter a distinct mental attitude from that involved in the case of the worship of the great gods. The latter impress themselves on the mind of the worshipper, commanding his respect and fear; the former correspond with the development of the animistic conception of everything in the world as animated by a spirit, but not necessarily a source of reverence, though from time to time an activity may be desired to operate to serve one’s end, and for that purpose temporary reverence may be requisite.⁵ The worship of the sun or the storm is *prima facie* likely to be older than respect paid to Vāstoṣpati or Kṣetrasya Pati, deities who imply settled life and agriculture, and still less can Uttuda or Nivartana claim superior antiquity. It is, therefore, probably better to recognize that the worship of the sun and of these Sondergötter ultimately rests on the basis of animatism, regarded as that attitude¹ which ‘endows [what we now consider] inanimate and material objects with quasi-human consciousness and emotions, and sometimes with a superhuman power and volition which suggest worship’, and which passes over to animism. On that view it is natural to hold that worship was first given to the great phenomena, and only by a later process of more abstract thought was it accorded to such entities as Uttuda or Nivartana.

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² iii. 25. 1.

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³ x. 19. 8.

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⁴ Cf. Servius, *Aen.* ii. 141: pontifices dicunt singulis actibus proprios deos praeesse; hos Varro certos deos appellat; Usener, *Götternamen*; Schrader, *Reallexicon der idg. Alt.* 679 f.

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⁵ See e. g. Carnoy, *Les Indo-Européens*, p. 207.

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¹ See Farnell, *Greek Hero Cults*, p. 79.

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A further development of this attitude of mind gives us gods who have no immediate concrete background of any kind, comparable to such abstract deities as Fides, which form an important and interesting part of Roman religion and have recently received careful investigation from Axtell² among others. To call them abstract is perhaps misleading: it is not to be supposed that in the period of their creation they were felt to be other than real powers. It is possible that the creation of such figures goes back to Indo-Iranian times, for the goddess Puraṁdhi, ‘plenteousness’, is paralleled by Pārendi in the Avesta.³ Such conceptions are found already in the Rigveda in such shapes as Wrath and Speech. Here too must be reckoned such figures as the gods Savitṛ, Dhātṛ, Trātṛ and Tvaṣṭṛ, whose names all denote them as agent gods, who impel, create, protect, and produce. The connexion of Savitṛ with the sun is fairly close, and is preserved from the earliest times in the repetition of the Sāvitrī verse,⁴ when in the morning the orthodox Indian householder salutes the rising sun with the words: ‘That desirable glory of the god Savitṛ we meditate, that he may inspire our thoughts.’ It is at least possible, therefore, that in its origin Savitṛ was not an independent creation, but was an epithet of Sūrya, but that question is of little importance: the essential feature of the god is not his original basis, but his function as the inspirer or impeller to holy sacrifice: the ritual act is repeatedly said in the Yajurveda to be done ‘on the instigation of the god Savitṛ’. To this stage of the creative imagination belongs also the conception of such gods as Prajāpati, the lord of all creatures, who is the great creator god, and who cannot be assigned to any natural basis. Perhaps too here must be reckoned the figure of Bṛhaspati⁵ or Brahmaṇaspati, ‘the lord of prayer’. The prayer with its magic potency or its effective appeal—the two ideas pass into each other in the later Rigveda—and the priest who wields this powerful instrument are blended in the conception of the lord of prayer. Nor to this theory is it any conclusive objection that the god is credited in the Rigveda with abundant activity which seems to rest on nature myths, in particular the cleaving of the caves in the mountains and the setting free of the cows, a story which is usually deemed to be a myth of the setting free of the dawns from the darkness of the storm. It is possible that, as it is the prayer which is potent to induce Indra to perform his great feats of strength, so the prayer comes to be ranked with him in its hypostatized form as Bṛhaspati and even to take his place. The most likely alternative view is to conceive that the name is an epithet of Agni, and that the conception was then developed independently of Agni’s natural basis by the priest: this is a perfectly conceivable idea, but in either case the essential feature is the fact that the natural basis, if any, is not the source of the mythology.

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² *The Deification of Abstract Ideas in Roman Literature and Inscriptions* (1907). See also Warde Fowler, *Religious Experience of the Roman People*, pp. 285, 291, 450, 451.

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³ Aramati and Armaiti are a parallel case, unless both originally had reference to earth; contra, Carnoy, *JAOS.* xxxvi. 309, where Aramati is only piety; cf. *Muséon* (n.s.), xiii. 133, n. 1, against Sāyaṇa, RV. vii. 36. 8; viii. 42. 3; Moulton, *Early Zoroastrianism*, p. 10.

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⁴ RV. iii. 62. 10. Cf. the epic goddess Sāvitrī; Hopkins, *Epic Myth.*, p. 86.

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⁵ *bṛh* is clearly an older form of *brahman*; see Oldenberg, *Die Lehre der Upanishaden*, p. 46, n. 1.

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