The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c19.s4.1.3

v1.c19.s4.1.3

Urvarā, the plough field, is also a goddess in the Sūtra literature, and is described as having a garland of threshing floors.¹ It would of course be absurd to suppose that these scanty remnants of worship represent the whole of the agricultural side of Vedic religion, and as a matter of fact in the ritual there are abundant traces of other ceremonies having to do with agriculture, but the deities of the field were evidently as such not of great importance in Vedic religion, the care of the prosperity of men in these respects having been taken over by the great gods. When agricultural and vegetation spirits as such have great honour among and importance in the ideas of a people, then their figures are elevated to the rank of the great deities, as is the case with Attis, Adonis, or perhaps even Osiris in the lands of Asia Minor and of Egypt,² and the fact that other deities are the great gods of Vedic religion cannot be explained on any other hypothesis than that the specific religious instinct of the Vedic people chose these forms as the favourite objects of its devotions. Curiously enough, the later religion of India gives a picture of the differences of religious predilection: the young Kṛṣṇa is represented as opposed to the worship of Indra by the pastoral world:³ he prefers instead that they should worship the mountains, their cattle, and the woods, just as ploughmen worship the furrow.