The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c19.s4.1.2

v1.c19.s4.1.2

these guardians are called various names which are hardly more than epithets, ‘having good bows and quivers’, on the east, ‘not winking the eyes’ and ‘wearing armour’, on the south, ‘prosperity’, ‘earth’, Pārṣṇi, Çunaṁkuri, on the west, and ‘those that are terrible’ and ‘like Vāyu in swiftness’, on the north.¹⁰ These figures are interesting: they cannot properly in any sense be classified with abstract deities, even if that class of deities can properly be set up: they are not personifications of human activities or feelings, but they are the deities involved in the operations of nature, Sondergötter, who live in the growth of the crop and may best perhaps be called animatistic spirits of vegetation, whose precise differentiation of character may plausibly be ascribed as in the case of the Roman Indigitamenta to the work of the priests. On the other hand Sītā has always a more elevated character than the rest of such spirits: she is called Sāvitrī in the Taittirīya Brāhmaṇa,¹¹ and she becomes the heroine of the Rāmāyaṇa, and the model of wifely truth and chastity, preserving none the less here and there traces of her connexion with the furrow and the fruitful earth.