The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c13.s1.t2.6

v1.c13.s1.t2.6

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