The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c24.6

v1.c24.6

The position of the other gods is essentially similar to that of Indra; on the one hand, most of them are not so near to men in feeling and have less human life in their natures, but at the same time they are free from the less creditable aspects which belong to Indra. Agni is in special closeness to the worshipper, as he is the guest who dwells in the house, and, therefore, a very present friend, but his close relation to the element renders his personality less clear than that of Indra, and so places a difficulty in the way of the generation of deeper human relations. His parentage of men is hardly marked: he is rather the prototype, as Aṅgiras, of the priest, and the great god of the priests. The only exception to the general rule is Rudra, and in a minor degree the Maruts, his companions.² Rudra is emphatically a terrible god: the ritual exhibits this characteristic in the constant assimilation of his character to that of the dead and the demons, and in the prayers this fact is clearly shown by the efforts ever made to induce him to spare the worshipper, his wife, his children, his horses, his cattle, to keep his weapons afar from him, and to be merciful. The wrath of the god is evidently easily awakened whether by prayer wrongly offered or obtruded upon him when busy otherwise,³ or merely spontaneously and without good cause: the complaint of Indra's inconstancy is quite different from the uneasy feeling of terror inspired in his votaries by Rudra: they had no doubt at all of his reality or his deadly powers. Of the other gods a hint or two of hostility is mentioned, but merely in the vaguest way, the gods themselves are once or twice—perhaps by assimilation to the Asuras—deemed hostile,⁴ but in an overwhelming number of cases we hear of the gods as good and true and generous to their worshippers.