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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c13.s1.t3: (c) Animatism, Sondergötter, and Abstract Deities

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c13.s1.t3

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(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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