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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c16.s2: § 2. Varuṇa, Mitra, and the Ādityas

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c16.s2

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§ 2. Varuṇa, Mitra, and the Ādityas

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The slight prominence of Dyaus in the Indian period is doubtless in part at least due to the prominence of Mitra and Varuṇa, of which pair the greatest by far is Varuṇa. Mitra, indeed, by his close association with Varuṇa has lost any real independence of character. Though Varuṇa is anthropomorphic and has arms, hands, feet, walks, drives, sits, eats, and drinks, the cosmic character of his eye is brought very clearly: the eye of Mitra and Varuṇa is repeatedly declared to be the sun, and it figures conspicuously in all the hymns regarding Varuṇa. Varuṇa is also far-sighted and thousand-eyed: he wears a golden mantle and a shining robe. He and Mitra drive with the rays of the sun as with arms, and like Savitṛ and Tvaṣṭṛ they are beautiful handed. In striking contrast with this picture of a fair god is that suggested by a passage in the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa,³ where Varuṇa is described as a bald yellow-eyed old man; but this passage must be read in its context, from which it appears clearly that we have to deal not with a primitive, but with a mystical, view of the nature of Varuṇa.

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³ xiii. 3. 6. 5.

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Like other gods, Mitra and Varuṇa have a chariot which they mount in the highest heaven, and in heaven is their golden abode, which is lofty with a thousand columns and a thousand doors. To that palace resorts the all-seeing sun to report to Varuṇa the deeds of men: in it the Fathers behold him, and the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa⁴ represents Varuṇa as seated in the midst of heaven, gazing upon the places of punishment around him.

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⁴ xi. 6. 1. 1.

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With Mitra, or alone, Varuṇa is often styled a king; he is king of both gods and men, of all that exists, of the whole world. He bears also the title of independent ruler (*svarāj*) which is more specially Indra’s, and, much oftener than Indra, he is called universal monarch (*samrāj*), a title found a few times also of Agni. With Mitra and twice also with Aryaman, he is accorded the attribute of sovereignty (*kṣatra*) which is elsewhere given but once each to Agni, Bṛhaspati, and the Açvins; similarly the term ruler is given to him in four of its five occurrences, and but once to the gods in general.⁵ He and Mitra are the noble lords of the gods, and the epithet Asura⁶ is given to him in proportion far oftener than to Indra and Agni.

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⁵ A relic of this is seen in the Brāhmaṇa legend that the gods made him their king, despite the fact that he was merely their brother, because he had the form (*rūpa*) of Prajāpati, their father, JB. iii. 152; cf. PB. xiii. 9. 22 ff.

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⁶ An effort to find in the epic Asura Maya a trace of Mazdāh in India may be rejected (Keith, JRAS. 1916, p. 138).

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Characteristic of the two gods is their mystic power, Māyā.¹ With it Varuṇa measures out the earth with the sun as with a measure; Varuṇa and Mitra make the sun to cross the sky, the rain to fall, and send the dawns. All physical order is subject to the control of Varuṇa with or without Mitra: the law of Varuṇa holds earth and sky apart; the three heavens and the three earths are deposited within him; heaven, earth, and air are supported by the two gods; the wind is the breath of Varuṇa. By his ordinances the moon moves at night and the stars shine. He embraces the nights and establishes the mornings. He regulates the seasons: the kings, Mitra, Varuṇa, and Aryaman, dispose the autumn, the month, day and night. From another point of view Mitra and Varuṇa are essentially connected with rain, and among the gods they are most frequently invoked to bestow the gift of rain. Occasionally even in the Rigveda Varuṇa appears connected with the waters of the ocean, to which flow the seven rivers, but the ocean² is little known in the Rigveda, and his real connexion with water is that with the waters of the air, whence comes it that in the Naighaṇṭuka he is ranked as an aerial no less than a celestial god.

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¹ Von Bradke, ZDMG. xlviii. 499-501; Hillebrandt, VOJ. xiii. 316 ff.

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² It is invoked, RV. vi. 50. 14; vii. 35. 13; viii. 12. 2; x. 66. 11; TS. iv. 6. 2; MS. iv. 9. 8; AGS. ii. 4. 14; MGS. i. 13. 15; Kauç. lxxiv. 6, &c.

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But more important than these physical attributes of the god are his moral qualities, his control of the order of the world in its ethical aspect no less than in its physical, his connexion with the worshipper as the saviour in time of peril and distress, the freer from sin, the merciful god, as well as the punisher of the sinner to whom he sends the disease, dropsy, which accords with his nature as lord of the waters. This characteristic of Varuṇa is one which will most conveniently be considered below (Chap. 16), but it is essential to note that this side of Varuṇa’s nature is one which steadily disappears in the later texts, though it does not absolutely vanish.³

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³ It is hardly fair to speak of his demoniac power (Hopkins, *Trans. Conn. Acad.*, xv. 44) on the strength of PB. xviii. 9. 7, 17 (offerings *nirvaruṇatvāya*, i.e. to deprecate punishment for error). But his curse is feeble (PB. xii. 18. 2), and his chief use is to dispose of errors in the offering, PB. xiii. 2. 4.; xv. 1. 3; 2. 4; 7. 7; he guards what is well offered, Viṣṇu repairs errors, AB. iii. 38.

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In the later literature there are other marked changes in the character of the god. In the first place Mitra and Varuṇa come to be placed into relation with the sun and the moon respectively: Mitra is said to have produced the day, Varuṇa the night: the night is Varuṇa’s, the day Mitra’s. In the Atharvaveda⁴ it is said ‘At evening he is Varuṇa, Agni; Mitra he becometh arising in the morning’ and ‘That which Varuṇa hath drawn together, shall Mitra asunder part in the morning.’ Even more significant is the fact that in the ritual to Mitra and Varuṇa respectively white and black victims are sometimes ascribed: there can be no doubt of the significance of this distinction in treatment of the two gods. In the second place there is a marked tendency to reduce Varuṇa to the control of the waters. In the Atharvaveda¹ he is connected with the waters as is Soma with the mountains; his golden house is in the waters; he sheds rain waters, and he and Mitra are the lords of waters. In the Yajurveda² similarly the waters are his wives, and he is the child of the waters, in which he establishes his abode, and Mitra and Varuṇa are the leaders of the waters. It is true that for these conceptions close parallels exist in the Rigveda, but the essential feature is that, in the new matter supplied by these Vedas, nothing which is not specifically connected with the waters is of much account. It is quite possible that the connexion with the moon aided the connexion with the waters, but this cannot be proved; in the Brāhmaṇas we find not merely the recognition of the connexion of the moon with rain, but equally the view that rain comes from the sun. Some force may be assigned to the view that with the growing knowledge of the ocean the tendency to restrict Varuṇa to that element increased parallel with the steady decline in the importance attached to the moral aspect of Varuṇa as a universal ruler.

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⁴ xiii. 3. 13; ix. 3. 18; cf. TS. ii. 1. 7. 4; vi. 4. 8. 3.

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¹ iii. 3. 3; iv. 15. 12; vii. 83. 1; v. 24. 1-5.

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² TS. v. 5. 4. 1; vi. 4. 3. 2; VS. x. 7.

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Apart from his connexion with Varuṇa we know little of Mitra: one hymn alone is given to him in the whole of the Rigveda,³ whence we learn that he brings men together by the utterance of his voice, and watches the tillers with unwinking eye. In one passage Savitṛ is identified with him, and Viṣṇu is said to take his three steps by the laws of Mitra, whence it may be assumed that he is supposed to regulate the course of the sun. The name is normally supposed to have been derived from the use of the word as friend, with which accords the fact that Mitra is essentially a kindly god, and in the Taittirīya Saṁhitā⁴ appears as promoting concord: Oldenberg⁵ has suggested that the use of the word arises rather from the name of the god whom he believes to have been invoked in compacts, perhaps with the use of a fetish of the god as part of the rite and the seven steps, which are mentioned in the Rigveda⁶ as a bond of friendship, and which in the marriage ritual are an essential part of the rite. The Iranian Mithra is obviously the same god, and, as his sun nature is almost absolutely certain, it is reasonable and natural to ascribe to the Vedic Mitra the same character. It is no objection to this view that the sun is described as the eye of Mitra: apart from the fact that the separation of the god from the natural substratum is perfectly natural, and can be seen in progress even in the Avesta where Mithra comes forth over the mountain of sunrise before the sun, it must be remembered that, in association with Varuṇa, Mitra can easily have obtained a description which strictly applied only to Varuṇa.

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³ iii. 59.

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⁴ ii. 1. 8. 4.

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⁵ *Rel. des Veda*², p. 188, n. 3.

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⁶ iv. 8. 1.

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The Ādityas form a somewhat indefinite group of gods: in the Rigveda they are accorded six whole hymns and portions of two others. The original number is slightly uncertain; once⁷ only in the Rigveda is it given as seven, and once¹ also as eight, but in that passage the priority of seven is clearly shown by the fact that it is stated that Aditi, their mother, at first presented only seven to the gods, and the eighth, Mārtāṇḍa, 'sprung of a dead egg,' came afterwards. The number seven is also found observed in the ritual of the Yajurveda² at a time when unquestionably the number twelve was normally accepted for the Ādityas. But the Rigveda at no time enumerates more than six and that once only, when the list is Mitra, Aryaman, Bhaga, Varuṇa, Dakṣa, and Aṁça. Sūrya, however, is an Āditya in the Rigveda, and he may be taken to make up the seven, with Mārtāṇḍa as the setting sun as the eighth. The Atharvaveda³ gives Aditi eight sons and the Taittirīya Brāhmaṇa⁴ gives their names as Mitra, Varuṇa, Aryaman, Aṁça, Bhaga, Dhātṛ, Indra and Vivasvant. The term Āditya is, however, applied to Indra, once in connexion with Varuṇa and once as the fourth Āditya. The Āditya *par excellence*, however, is Varuṇa, next comes Mitra, and next Aryaman. In the Brāhmaṇas the number of the Ādityas is normally fixed at twelve, and they are identified with the twelve months. This explanation of their number is much more natural and plausible than the view of Oldenberg⁵ that the number is borrowed from the Jagatī metre which is associated with the Ādityas. In the Maitrāyaṇī Saṁhitā⁶ we find Indra distinguished expressly from the group of twelve. More generally, however, all the gods seem not rarely to be styled Ādityas, as is natural enough since the only real characteristic the group can be said to possess is that they are the gods of the light of the heaven.

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⁷ ix. 114. 3.

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¹ x. 72. 8.

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² TS. ii. 3. 1. 5. This fact is of consequence and Hillebrandt (*Ved. Myth.* iii. 103, 104) does not answer it. Cf. von Schroeder, *Arische Religion*, i. 427 ff., who thinks Parjanya was the seventh Āditya.

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³ viii. 9. 21.

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⁴ i. 1. 9. 1.

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⁵ *Rel. des Veda*¹, p. 186, n. 2.

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⁶ ii. 1. 12.

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The Ādityas, sons of Aditi, as their name denotes, are bright, golden, unwinking, sinless, pure, and holy. They hate falsehood and punish sin; they fetter their enemies, but protect as with armour their votaries, and forgive their wickedness; sickness and distress they repel, and grant the usual boons of long life and offspring.

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Of the individual deities Aryaman, who is Indo-Iranian in character, and may even be akin to the Irish ancestor Airem, has practically no distinctive feature save his friendly nature which makes him a parallel with Mitra: the word also denotes groomsman, and this idea is, it seems, associated with the god, who is thus brought into connexion with human life and marriage. His path is alluded to, whence Indian tradition regards him as the sun, but Weber as the milky way.⁷ Bhaga, as his name denotes, is the bountiful, or perhaps rather the god of good fortune, the disposition which produces in a woman luck in marriage, for a man success in the assembly, in the hunt, in dicing, or in winning pupils, and plays on the name of the god are not unnatural in a religion so full of the spirit of greed for the bounty of the patrons of the priests; Dawn is his sister, and Yāska describes him as presiding over the forenoon. His name is the equivalent of the Avestan *bagha*, ‘god,’ which is an epithet of Ahura himself, of Bagaios in Phrygia, and of the Old Church Slavonic *bogŭ*, ‘god’.¹ Aṁça is mentioned but three times in all: his name denotes the apportioner and nothing but his bounty is recorded. Dakṣa occurs about twice as often, and is a more interesting figure: in one hymn of the late tenth book² he is said to be the father of Aditi and also the son of Aditi, and the gods are made later in origin: in another passage the existent and non-existent are said to have been in the womb of Aditi, the birthplace of Dakṣa. The word means no more than ‘clever’, and there can be no doubt that he is the product of priestly ingenuity. The Ādityas and also Mitra and Varuṇa are called sons of skill, just as they are called sons of strength: from this epithet the element skill has been elevated into the name of a god, and in the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa³ Dakṣa is exalted to the rank of Prajāpati: at no time can he have been anything but a mere abstraction of a type especially dear to the later priestly intelligence, which delighted in the conception of the god, who was at one and the same time the father and the son of his mother.

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⁷ Sāyaṇa on ÇB. v. 3. 1. 2; Weber, *Festgruss an Roth*, p. 138; *Rājasūya*, p. 84, n. 2.

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¹ This may be a loan word. There is no decisive evidence; cf. Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², p. 190, n. 2; von Schroeder, *Arische Religion*, i. 288 ff., 562–7, who distinguishes the Greeks, Romans, Germans, and Celts as of *centum* speech, and adorers of a warlike god, and one who patronizes political activity, from the *satem* speakers with their milder deity, but unconvincingly (Oldenberg, GN. 1915, pp. 361–72).

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² x. 72. 4, 5; 5. 7.

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³ ii. 4. 4. 2.

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The natural conception which lies at the root of Varuṇa and the Ādityas, is, it is clear, far from obvious. Both Varuṇa and the group of Ādityas have lost or never had immediate connexion with nature, and have developed their individuality in such a way as to make their original identity uncertain. Contrast with Indra shows that Varuṇa’s original nature must have been something which afforded little chance of the growth of mythology: practically no myth is connected with Varuṇa at all, while the strong god Indra is the subject of by far the greater number of Vedic myths. The name of Varuṇa gives little assistance: it has been connected with the Greek Ouranos, but the phonetic correspondence⁴ is not yet clearly made out, and the identity must remain doubtful: it seems naturally to be derived from the root *vṛ*, cover, so that the first meaning would be the coverer or encompasser, and native tradition explains it in this sense as the god who envelops like darkness or covers with his bonds. If so, the parallel and contrast with Vṛtra are interesting. It is possible that it originally was an epithet of sky, as the all-encompassing, but it would be too dangerous to lay any stress on the apparent etymological sense as denoting the character of the god.

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⁴ Macdonell, *Ved. Myth.*, p. 177; Meillet, *JA.* 1907, ii. 156 f.

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In the view of Oldenberg,⁵ Varuṇa was originally the moon, as Mitra was the sun, and he with the Ādityas, of whom he is one, were not originally Indo-European gods, but were borrowed by the united Indo-Iranian people from some Semitic race, which had a more advanced knowledge of astronomy than the Vedic Indians, and which knew the five planets, which with the sun and moon made up the seven Ādityas. But he does not consider that, when the gods were taken over, they were really fully understood in their original nature by the Indo-Iranians, and in particular he believes that the strongly ethical aspect of Varuṇa had already been developed, since this fact alone can explain how a moon god took precedence of the sun god Mitra. He rejects of course connexion with Ouranos, and he lays stress on the fact that these two gods seem a distinct innovation as compared with the ordinary Indo-European gods. The conception of Varuṇa as moon god is also shared by Hillebrandt¹ and by Hardy.

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⁵ *Rel. des Veda*², pp. 187 ff.; ZDMG. 1. 43–68; cf. F. W. Thomas, JRAS. 1916, pp. 363 f.; T. Segerstedt (RHR. lvii. 195 ff.) finds in Varuṇa an aboriginal deity. Carnoy (JAOS. xxxvi. 307 f.) inclines to suggest comparison with Sin for Varuṇa, and Šamaš for Mitra,

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¹ *Ved. Myth.* iii. 1–51. He denies the identity of Asura and Ahura Mazdāh, but this is a hopeless idea; above, Part I, Chap. 4, § 1. For the seven whence Mitra’s nature as this sun (*Les Indo-Européens*, pp. 172 ff.). He sees a triad in India, Varuṇa, Mitra, Aryaman, parallel to Ahura Mazdāh, Mithra, Anāhita, and thinks the number seven connected with the seven spirits of good and evil, Igigi and Anunnaki. gods of Babylon and the seven planets see also Jeremias in Roscher’s *Lexicon*, iii. 67. The Ameša Spenta are discussed by Moulton, *Early Zoroastrianism*, pp. 73 ff., 96 ff., 296 ff.; L. Gray, *Archiv f. Relig.* vii. 345–72; B. Geiger, *Die Ameša Spentas* (1916); L. von Schroeder, *Arische Religion*, i. 430 ff.

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The arguments of Oldenberg are of importance and weight: it is perfectly true that the moral quality of Varuṇa and of the Ādityas is of a different species from that of Indra and most of the other members of the Vedic pantheon, to whom morality is rather an outward accretion than an internal principle. It is true also that the history of Indian religion is one of the decadence of Varuṇa before the claims on the one hand of the warrior god Indra, the god *par excellence* of the Indian warrior, and on the other hand of Agni, the god of the sacrifice and of the sacrificial priest, and of Prajāpati, in whom the cosmological and pantheistic views of the more reflective section of the priesthood found their expression. Prajāpati is from the philosophic point of view a much greater personage than Varuṇa, but he has no real connexion with morality, just as the philosophy of India has no place in which to ascribe to morality any real value. But to hold that this ethical quality must have been introduced from without not only into Indian, but also into Iranian religion, seems to go far beyond what can be made even probable. What ground have we, it must be asked, for denying to the people of Iran the capacity of developing such deities for themselves? The reform of Zoroaster is a proof that Iran was capable of moral fervour and energy, and that Iran was subjected to effective Semitic influence has been rendered most improbable.² The decline of Varuṇa in India is not a proof that the Vedic Indians were incapable of having such a deity as Varuṇa brought with them from earlier Iranian homes, but that the effect of the admixture of race in India itself was fatal to the conception of Varuṇa. Moreover, borrowing of deities can only be made plausible when the precise deity borrowed can be specified and identity of character indicated if not proved, and when the name in addition can be traced. In the case of Varuṇa and the Ādityas the effort to show the group of deities which has been borrowed cannot even be made, and the suggestion of borrowing is therefore methodologically unsound.

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² Moulton, *Early Zoroastrianism*, pp. 67, 98, 237–43; von Schroeder, *Arische Religion*, i. 439 f.

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Nor is there really any insuperable difficulty in finding another naturalistic basis for Varuṇa and an explanation of his moral authority. The old view that Varuṇa is the all encompassing sky is not open to any serious objection. It explains perfectly well all that he does in the physical world: his place, in the highest heaven, his sending of rain, the fact that the sun is his eye, his epithet of far-seeing, his thousand eyes which doubtless point to the stars of night—possibly his spies, though that conception may be otherwise explained as belonging to the conception of him as king¹ it is no objection that Varuṇa is represented as mounting a car in the highest heaven with Mitra: the god is clearly to some degree detached from his material substratum, and therefore is treated in this point as any other deity. The conception of an almighty ruler is most easily developed from the vast expanse of the sky, on which the sun moves in its regular course, and which seems to gaze upon the deeds of men. It is of course impossible to prove that Zeus has attained his position in the Hellenic pantheon entirely in this way, but the parallel is certainly striking enough to render the view that Varuṇa thus became a great moral ruler reasonable enough.

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¹ Foy, *Die königliche Gewalt*, pp. 80–6; Moulton (*op. cit.*, p. 61) inclines to deny any celestial character in the god; von Schroeder (*Arische Religion*, i. 343) finds two roots of Varuṇa's character, the observation of the glories of the sky and the consciousness of the moral law, in harmony with his belief in the latter consideration as one of the three essential roots of religion, beside nature worship and belief in souls.

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On the other hand the comparison of the Ādityas and the Ameša Spenta seems certainly right and the objections which have been raised to it are not of a serious kind.² It is true that neither in India nor in Iran is the number seven absolutely fixed, but as early as the Rigveda the number seven is evidently becoming the normal one, and similarly in the Avesta the number seven is springing up, in the close connexion between Zoroaster and six other spirits. The fact that these six spirits do not correspond in name or function precisely with the Indian deities is of no consequence, if we adopt the view that the deities were not in the Indo-Iranian period very closely connected with any sphere of nature.³ This is certainly supported by the obvious fact that in India the figures of Bhaga, Aṁça, Dakṣa, and Aryaman are abstract, while the whole six in Iran are of this type. To presume an independent development of the ideas in both countries is really to assume something much more improbable than a common origin. Oldenberg’s theory that the five other than Mitra and Varuṇa represented the planets is wholly without support either in Iran or India, where the knowledge of the planets cannot be attributed at all to the age of the Rigveda or even much later.

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² See Macdonell, *Ved. Myth.*, p. 44; Hillebrandt's objections are in *Ved. Myth.* iii. 122 ff.; Moulton's *Early Zoroastrianism*, p. 98; cf. Oldenberg, ZDMG. l. 43 ff.

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³ L. H. Gray (*Archiv für Religionswissenschaft*, vii. 345–72) sees in them pre-Iranian nature powers, but without cogent grounds; cf. von Schroeder, *Arische Religion*, i. 282, n. 1; Güntert, *Der arische Weltkönig*, pp. 170 ff.

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Apart from the question of Semitic origin the identification of Varuṇa with the moon is absolutely without support. It can only be justified by the later Saṁhitās, which, however, are far more readily explained by the obvious fact that Varuṇa was being superseded in his position of greatness by Indra, Agni, and Prajāpati, and that accordingly it was natural for the priest to seek to find some position for him, which would naturally explain his connexion with Mitra, whose nature as a sun god was never forgotten in Iran or India. With the hypothesis of Varuṇa as a moon god might, of course, be brought into connexion the fact that the Ādityas are seven, which has also been cited for their Semitic origin. But there is no real proof of the existence of any knowledge in Vedic India of a seven-day week,¹ and it may be added that, save for the Jewish seven-day week, no such period is proved² for any Semitic civilization at an early date.

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¹ Hopkins (*Oriental Studies*, p. 159) assumes it for the AV. but without proof.

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² Above, Part I, Chap. 4, § 2.

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Yet another view of the position of Varuṇa and Mitra is that presented by E. Meyer.³ He sees in them later productions of the religious conception: while Indra, if not in name, at least in essence, is an Indo-European god, being really one aspect of the sky god, Varuṇa and Mitra are essentially products of the Indo-Iranian period of religious thought, and the Asuras never are on the same level with the Devas: in India for a time, that is in the period of the Rigveda, they seem to have been to some extent recognized as at least equal with the Devas, and Varuṇa actually in some circles ranked above Indra, but this condition did not last, and, while in the case of Iran the Zoroastrian reform developed the essential character of the Asuras and made the Daēvas demons, in India the Asuras sank to demons, and Varuṇa was relegated to the position of lord of the sea, while Mitra was little but a name. The origin of the deities he traces in moral, not natural concepts, the nature connexion of the gods being due to the inability of primitive thought to remain at the high pitch of moral conception. Mitra is primarily⁴ the lord of the contract, that between individual men no less than that between clans and states, while Varuṇa is the god of the oath.⁵ Hence perhaps Varuṇa is to be deemed to have been connected with the ocean surrounding the world, by which, as in the case of the Styx in Greek religion, oaths might be taken, and from this connexion with water developed his connexion with the waters of the heaven, the earth, and the ocean alike. But from their moral position the two gods are both essentially celestial, Mitra being especially connected in thought with the sun, while Varuṇa was less definitely restricted in his physical range. The possibility of connexion between Varuṇa and Ouranos Meyer naturally denies.¹

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³ *Gesch. des Alt.*³ I. ii. pp. 922–4.

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⁴ Meillet, JA. 1907, ii. 143; Carnoy, *Les Indo-Européens*, pp. 172 ff. Moulton (*Early Zoroastrianism*, pp. 62–7) tries to make out that Mitra is a combination of a god of contract and a Semitic Rain god (Assyrian Meṭru), but this is clearly wrong. Cf. Hillebrandt, *Ved. Myth.*, p. 123.

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⁵ Lüders, SBA. 1910, p. 931. The occurence of both in the Mitanni treaty is assumed to support this view by Cuny, *Rev. ét. anc.* 1909, pp. 279 f. Speculations as to Mitra in Egypt and his influence on the Aten worship are interesting but of no importance for Indian religion. Cf. Max Müller, OLZ. 1912, pp. 252 ff.

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¹ Feist (*Kultur der Indogermanen*, p. 343, n. 1) admits the similarity of the two ideas and names, and therefore ascribes them to a non-Indo-Germanic common source; he treats Saraṇyū-Erinys, Gandharva-Kentauros, similarly.

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The evidence adduced to the views of Meyer is inadequate; it is quite clear that Varuṇa and Mitra came into special connexion with the agreement and the oath respectively, but neither fact is enough to show that the deity was developed from either conception alone, and we cannot prove that it is more plausible to assume such a derivation than to accept the view that to these great gods of the sky the conception of the control of moral order and contract was naturally assigned. The importance of the sun as a deity is sufficiently shown for Iranian religion by the fact that he became the chief god of the Massagetae,² and the importance of Mithra as a sun-god in later Iran is notorious. It is on the other hand more easy to understand how concrete gods attained moral aspects³ than to believe that moral gods became so remarkably concrete in nature.

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² Herodotos, i. 216. There is no reason to deny the Iranian character of this people, even if it were in part of mixed blood; the similarity of Mongolian and Aryan religion is doubtless due to similar conditions of development on the steppes (cf. Minns, *Scythians and Greeks*, pp. 85 ff.; Meyer, *Gesch. des Alt.*³ I. ii. pp. 887–95).

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³ For Mithra’s guardianship of truth see Yašt, x. 2. Güntert (pp. 146 ff.) holds him and Varuṇa (*ver*, bind) abstract.

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