The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c17.s1.58

v1.c17.s1.58

In other cases myths are attached to Indra, in which we need not seek any direct connexion with his nature: as a great god he can stretch out heaven and earth, and in particular he settles the quaking mountains, while in the later Vedic texts he is said to have cut off the wings of the mountains and to have reduced them to a stationary condition.² The wings then became the thunder clouds. The separation of heaven and earth is sometimes attributed to his victory over a demon,³ who held them together: the faint parallelism with the Hesiodic myth⁴ is hardly worth note. If anything more than imagination is to be seen in the idea, it may be that the light appearing seems to separate the heaven and earth joined by the darkness. Probably, too, we must not see any reference to the myth of Vṛtra is the oft repeated wonder of the poet that Indra places in the red or raw cow the cooked milk. The problem seems to have been a favourite one in India. A less satisfactory side of his character is revealed in his addition to the drinking of Soma: a curious, if late, hymn⁵ is represented as the monologue of the drunken Indra, who sees himself able to do anything he likes in the intoxication produced by his deep draughts. His over-indulgence in the drink has been noted, and it was his desire for it which drove him to slay his father. He is also the hero of more than one amour; an old litany, the Subrahmaṇyā, addresses him as the lover of Ahalyā, a Brahman, calling himself Gautama, from which the Brāhmaṇas derive the natural explanation that he approached Ahalyā, wife of Gautama, under her husband's name and form.⁶ To Weber the episode denotes that the dawn of morning ascends the bright sky, but their loving commerce is broken by the cloud coming up, but it would be unwise to press the accuracy of such an explanation. It may be rather ranked with the many aetiological myths of different countries in which a family claims divine descent through the intercourse of a god with an ancestress, whose honour is saved by the representation that the god approached her in the guise of her lawful spouse. A still more obscure story¹ tells how a maiden, Apālā, found Soma beside a river, and having pressed it dedicated it to Indra, from whom she received the fulfilment of certain desires. Yet more obscure if possible is the famous Vṛṣākapi hymn,² which narrates a dispute which arose between Indra and Indrāṇī over an ape, Vṛṣākapi, which was the dear friend of Indra, but which had aroused the anger of Indrāṇī by destroying some of her property. Vṛṣākapi is induced, despite his caution, to be caught by Indrāṇī and is beaten by Indra, and banished from the house. Indra, however, misses his companion, and in some way not intelligible a reconciliation is effected. It would be idle to seek mythological conceptions in this strange confusion of ideas, and von Bradke³ has ingeniously suggested that the hymn is none other than a satire on a contemporary prince and his consort under the titles of the god and goddess. The problem is plainly insoluble. Another odd tale is that of his stealing Aiṣakṛta Çitibāhu's Soma in monkey form, this power of change of shape adhering to him in later tradition,⁴ where he appears as a leech, parrot, or cat.