The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c17.s10.64

v1.c17.s10.64

Stress is laid by Arbman on the term Tryambaka which is accorded to Rudra in the Rigveda, and which he interprets as referring to the god as having three mothers, a fact which connects him in Arbman’s view with the cult of mothers, i. e. demonesses as patron goddesses in medieval and modern India.¹ If the connexion were real, we might then see in the Rudra of the Rigveda a figure already complicated by contamination with an aboriginal deity, for there is little evidence or probability of mother worship as Aryan or Indo-European,² and every sign that it was dear to the Dravidian or other aboriginal population. But the suggested interpretation is wholly dubious; we do not hear later of Çiva as having three mothers, though Skanda has seven, and our only early tradition asserts that Ambikā is the sister of Rudra, not his wife, and that she is the autumn.³ It is, therefore, much more probable that the epithet refers to the god either as connected with three seasons, or as connected with the three worlds, heaven, air, and earth, as is the case with the Maruts and is natural in a god of igneous connexions. It is admitted that with Agni Rudra is most intimately connected, and of Agni nothing is more assured than his triple nature. Nor is it possible to find any support for the view of Tryambaka suggested by Arbman in the Traiyambaka offering of the Çrauta ritual,⁴ in which nothing whatever appears to explain the name in this sense, apart altogether from the fact that we have no evidence whatever that the rite in question was known to the Rigveda, and later rites frequently stand in no vital connexion with the original nature of the deities to whom they are addressed or who are invoked in them.⁵