The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c9.46

v1.c9.46

As sources for knowledge of the Vedic deities the later Saṁhitās and the Brāhmaṇas cannot be ranked high: the essential aim of the Yajurveda is the correct performance of the sacrifice, and the deities are of little consequence in comparison with the mechanism of that operation, to which is ascribed the whole control of the universe, and in the performance of which the universe is ever renewed. In the case of the Atharvaveda the position of the deities is still less important: constantly as they are introduced, their connexion with the magic spells which are the most original and essential part of that text is external merely: the god, and still more his name, adds potency to the spell, and the more gods enumerated, however diverse their functions and spheres of influence, the better the result. Even where in that Saṁhitā a deity is celebrated, the spirit is quite different from the spirit of the Rigveda: the goddess earth has a whole long hymn in a late book of the Atharva,² but the careful catalogue of all that grows on the earth and the sights and sounds upon it is recounted in a spirit quite unparalleled in the Rigveda. Hence it is not surprising that many of the minor figures of the pantheon of the Rigveda disappear, or at best sink to mere names, while on the other hand the religion shows development in two different directions. On the one hand, theosophic speculation brings into existence new and in some degree abstract deities; on the other, gods of the people receive a recognition which is not accorded to them in the Rigveda. Of the former tendency the most prominent example is the rise to high rank of Prajāpati, as the creator god and the father of the gods as of men, and the exaltation to the rank of deities of such abstractions as Kāla, 'time', Kāma, 'desire', Rohita, 'the ruddy one', perhaps an aspect of the sun, the Vrātya, as the convert to the priestly faith was named, the Ucchiṣṭa, or 'remnant' of the sacrificial offering, and so forth. Of the other tendency examples are to be seen in the increasing importance attached to Rudra and to Viṣṇu, who by the time of Megasthenes (*c.* 300 B.C.)³ were two of the chief gods worshipped in Northern India, and in whom we must probably see contamination of aboriginal with Aryan deities, the direct worship of snakes, perhaps induced by the experience of their terrors in India, the stress laid on the popular figures of the Apsarases and the Gandharvas, who, whatever their origin, are clearly little more in this period than fairies and sprites, and perhaps the collective view of the Asuras as a horde of evil spirits opposed in eternal, if unsuccessful, struggles to the gods in which they defeat their adversaries, until by the discovery of some ritual device the gods outwit them, a conception the utility of which to the priesthood who devise the sacrifice is obvious.