[Pramāṇa](https://indike.org/pramana/) › [Studies](https://indike.org/pramana/ins) › [Religion and philosophy](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.religion) › [The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.religion.keith-1925) › v1.c19.s4.1 # The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c19.s4.1 The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c19.s4.1 - **Language:** English ### [v1.c19.s4.1.1](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.religion.keith-1925.v1.c19.s4.1.1) The deity of the field as Kṣetrasya Pati, ‘lord of the field’, in the Rigveda¹ is invoked to grant cattle and horses, and with sweetness to fill heaven and earth, the plants, and the waters. In another hymn² he is asked, along with Savitṛ, the Dawns, and Parjanya to bestow prosperity, and elsewhere it is said that worshippers are fain to have him as a neighbour. The full nature of the deity is made clear in the Gṛhya ritual,³ which prescribes offerings to him when the field is ploughed, and he is, it is clear, no more than the deity believed to be in the ploughed land.⁴ Similarly the Rigveda contains an invocation of Sītā, the furrow, to grant rich blessings and crops.⁵ The figure of this goddess naturally has more life in the Sūtras,⁶ which deal with the operations of agriculture: she appears as the wife of Indra, which may be due to the fact that in the Rigveda⁷ the god is once called Urvarāpati, ‘lord of the plough field,’ and her existence is manifested in the four Sondergötter, the deities Sītā, Āçā, Araḍā, and Anaghā, who are to be worshipped at the furrow sacrifice, the threshing-floor sacrifice, the sowing of the crop, and the reaping and the putting the crop into the barn.⁸ In another Sūtra⁹ we have, beside the offering to Sītā and to three other deities, Yajā, Çamā, and Bhūti, who are less concrete than is she, offerings to the guardians of the furrow on the four sides; ### [v1.c19.s4.1.2](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.religion.keith-1925.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. ### [v1.c19.s4.1.3](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.religion.keith-1925.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. ### [v1.c19.s4.1.4](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.religion.keith-1925.v1.c19.s4.1.4) In cases like these it is impossible not to observe a definite cleavage of religious sentiment, which it is perfectly legitimate to apply as a principle to Vedic religion. The theory which seems sometimes to be held that the Vedic literature does not really give us the popular religion of the time cannot be supported, when it is applied to the literature as a whole, including the Sūtras of the domestic ritual, which are packed with popular ideas and magic practices of every kind. --- Source: [https://indike.org/pramana/ins.religion.keith-1925.v1.c19.s4.1](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.religion.keith-1925.v1.c19.s4.1) · Pramāṇa