The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c20.s1.6

v1.c20.s1.6

As a fourth class we may reckon those deities who express a state, activity, or condition such as wealth, or destruction and misfortune, good fortune, greatness, fame, strength, or almost any other idea. It is often difficult in the extreme to decide what deities must be placed among the abstract deities as opposed to those which may be held to be concrete: the two classes flow into one another, and no absolute bases of distinction exist or can exist. Nor again in many cases can we know to what extent in personifications we have to do with real recognition of divine powers, nor what conceptions exactly attached to the personifications. It is clear that these ideas grew up in a period when the conception of evil spirits which threatened injury was well known, and this conception may have been matched with one which recognized good spirits which would afford help,¹ and these spirits could be conceived in the most varied and unsystematic forms. The enumerations of divine personages who are asked to aid in many cases seem simply devices to secure the utmost degree of protection for the suppliant: the Sūtras in particular seem often determined to invoke as many and as curiously varied deities as possible, reviving for the purpose gods² who would otherwise be held to be of no possible consequence, as well as providing us with deities elsewhere unknown and unheard of.³