The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c13.s1.t3.9

v1.c13.s1.t3.9

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.