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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c13.s1.t1: (a) Anthropomorphism

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c13.s1.t1

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English

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(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.

Cites (3)