The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c13.s1.t3.1

v1.c13.s1.t3.1

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.