The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c16.s1: § 1. Dyaus the Father
The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c16.s1
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§ 1. Dyaus the Father
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DYAUS has the honour of being the only Indo-European god who is certainly to be recognized as having existed in the earliest period, and he has been claimed for that time as a real sovereign of the gods, much as Zeus among the Greeks.¹ For this view there is clearly no cogent evidence available, though equally there is no cogent evidence to the contrary, for the fact that Dyaus is not a great god in India may be due to decline in greatness, not to the absence of such greatness originally. In the Rigveda he has not a single hymn of his own, and his appearance is nearly always in one or other of two capacities: either he is the parent, who has as children Uṣas, the Açvins, Agni, Parjanya, Sūrya, the Ādityas, the Maruts, and the Aṅgirases, or he is coupled with the earth, Pṛthivī, or at least mentioned with other deities of whom Pṛthivī is normally one²; the legend of the union and separation of the two is often referred to, but without detail. Where he stands alone, he is mentioned as father of Indra, of Agni, as a father, as rich in seed, as a red bull which bellows downward, or, by another theriomorphic idea, as a black steed decked with pearls, an obvious allusion to the midnight sky. He smiles through the clouds, a trait which can only refer to the lightening sky, and an incipient anthropomorphism appears in the statement that he holds the bolt. With Pṛthivī he shares six hymns, but they have little force or significance; of more interest is the fact that sky and earth are called the two mothers, and that not rarely the word *dyaus* is feminine, a fact which shows that much weight cannot be laid on the contrast between male and female, stress upon which as a principle of Vedic religion has been laid by Bergaigne.³ With the higher life of the community Dyaus has little to do; he bears the usual title of the great gods, Asura, and with earth he is asked to avert sin committed against the gods or a friend or the head of the clan, but this is merely an application to the god of a commonplace prayer.⁴ The Vedic evidence is, it should be noted, clearly opposed to the view of Warde Fowler,¹ which does not recognize physical paternity as the primitive sense of *pater* in religion.²
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¹ von Bradke, *Dyaus Asura*; von Schroeder, *Arische Religion*, i. 299 ff. Moulton (*Early Zoroastrianism*, pp. 391–3) finds this god expressly recorded by his South Indo-European name in Herodotos, i. 131, but not very plausibly. Contrast Helm, *Altgerm. Rel.* i. 272; Rhys, *Celtic Heathendom*, pp. 109 f.
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² The two receive a good deal of attention in the ritual; Hillebrandt, *Ved. Myth.* iii. 397.
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³ Hopkins, *Rel. of India*, pp. 43, 59. The idea has been revived in K. J. Johansson, *Ueber die altind. Göttin Dhiṣaṇā* (1919), but see Oldenberg, GGA. 1919, pp. 357 ff.
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⁴ The theory of the ghost origin of Dyaus (Feist, *Kultur der Indogermanen*, pp. 339 ff.) is wholly improbable and quite contrary to the Veda.
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¹ *Religious Experience of the Roman People*, pp. 155 ff. Contrast von Schroeder, *Arische Religion*, i. 309 ff., 569 f.
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² In the case of Dyaus the regular use of the word as a common noun doubtless told against his personality; see Usener, *Götternamen*, pp. 315 ff.