The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.s4: D. The Drink of Immortality
The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.s4
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D. The Drink of Immortality
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G. Dumézil in his *Le Festin d'Immortalité*³ seeks to establish, despite the silence of the Veda, the existence of an Indo-European myth of the winning of the drink of immortality. From the epic legend of the churning of the ocean he derives a myth which tells how, in fear of death, the gods took counsel as to procuring a drink to preserve them from it. Viṣṇu advises them to churn the ocean for it, and, after coming to terms with the demons, and obtaining the assent of the god of the ocean, they accomplish their end, producing the Amṛta, and other good things, including Lakṣmī; a poison engendered in the churning is drunk by Çiva, whose neck thus becomes blue. The Asuras, however, steal the Amṛta, and demand Lakṣmī; Viṣṇu-Nārāyaṇa, in female guise, accompanied by Nara, in similar costume, goes to them, and wins them over to give him the Amṛta, which then he bears back to the gods. They proceed to drink the nectar; the demon, Rāhu, found among them is decapitated by Viṣṇu, and the fall of his body produces much commotion of the earth. A fight follows, in which the Asuras, defeated by the gods, are banished to the earth and the waters, and the gods remain in definitive possession of the drink.⁴
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³ *Annales du Musée Guimet*, xxxiv (Paris, 1924).
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⁴ MBh. i. 1095 ff.
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Dumézil seeks to show⁵ that on principle the silence of the Vedic texts is not fatal to the early character of the legend, considering that these texts show no disinterested narratives of legends, and that the philosophical thought of the Vedic age was not concerned with this special theme. Similarly, he insists that the Avesta represents most imperfectly the true Iranian nature beliefs. The arguments *a priori* have weight, but it seems impossible to accept his reconstructed primitive legend⁶ as established by the legends he recounts, including the Scandinavian legend of the beer of the Ases, the Greek legends of the war of the gods and the giants and of Prometheus and the Pithos of Immortality, the Latin tale of Anna Perenna or its Christian version as Anna Petronilla, a Celtic Grail legend and the Slav legend of Mikhailo Potyk and Maria, the white swan. Here and there in these tales common ideas can be seen, often doubtless much transformed, but there is far too little evidence to enable us to claim Indo-European antiquity for the complex myth which Dumézil evolves from the scanty evidence. The conclusion to be drawn is rather against than for the epic as a source of early myths; in truth what is in origin mythical is there often so transformed by imagination as to be barely recognizable, and a good deal more can be said for Hertel’s contention that the Brāhmaṇas present a much superior field for the discovery, in thin disguises, of true nature myths.
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⁵ pp. viii ff.
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⁶ pp. 24 ff.
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Dumézil further¹ deduces as the basis of the legends the existence of an Indo-European festival in the spring, at which was drunk in communion the sacred drink, originally a kind of beer derived from barley, which was replaced by wine in Greece, and by Soma among the Indo-Iranians. With this drink the Indo-Europeans associated the idea of life without end, and the success of the gods over the demons their rivals; but in the rites of which we have historical information many other elements of vegetation ritual have intruded themselves. He negatives² the idea that the mead was primitively the ambrosia; nothing in the legends recalls either the special characteristics nor the mode of preparation of the hydromel. If in Greece the ideas of ἀμβροσία and μέθυ were confused, it was because both lost their precise sense, and similarly in India the distinction between Amṛta and Madhu was obliterated by reason of the attraction of the idea of Soma. A trace of the old pre-eminence of beer is to be seen in a legend of the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa,³ where the barley is declared to have alone remained faithful to the gods in their demon contests, while the episode in the epic of the poison which arose in the churning of the ocean is held to be a distant echo of the process of fermentation of the beer which is apt to go too far, as in the narrative of the Kalevala.⁴ In these details again it is clearly impossible to find any cogent proof of the existence of an Indo-European rite.
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¹ pp. 265 ff.
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² pp. 279 ff.
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³ iii. 6. 1. 8, 9.
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⁴ xx; Dumézil, pp. 284 f.
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Geldner⁵ has suggested that references to the legend of the churning of the ocean are to be found in the Rigveda. Thus in v. 2. 3 he interprets the *amṛtaṁ vipṛkvat*, which the Purohita throws on the fire, as denoting the ghee which separates itself out, as did the Amṛta at the churning of the ocean. Again in i. 163 he holds that the poet is dealing, not with the sun-horse, but with the coming into being of the ‘Urross’, whether from the sun (verse 2) or, along with the Soma, from the ocean (*asi somena samayā vipṛktaḥ*). The whole stress of the argument rests on the artificial sense ascribed to *vipṛc* in both passages, and it is quite impossible to accept Geldner’s suggestion, which is not repeated by Dumézil.
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⁵ *Festgruss an Roth*, p. 192, but cf. *Der Rigveda*, i. 203.
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Another and very different view of Amṛta is put forward by Slater⁶ as part of the quite implausible hypothesis of the predominance in India of a Dravidian civilization based on reaction to Egyptian influence. He suggests that Amṛta was either Egyptian beer or the fermented juice of the date palm, palmyra, or coconut palm, the great intoxicating beverage of India, the art of making toddy of this kind having reached India from Mesopotamia, the home of the date palm cultivation. It is sufficient to observe that the maker of the conjecture appears to be ignorant of the patent fact that Amṛta in the Rigveda denotes beyond doubt the Soma drink, and there is no conceivable possibility of reconciling the description of the Soma plant as contained in Vedic references and the date palm.
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⁶ *The Dravidian Element in Indian Culture*, pp. 78 ff. See below, Appendix G.
Linked texts (3)
- Ṛgvedasaṃhitā — Sanskrit
- Śatapathabrāhmaṇa — Yājñavalkya & Śāṇḍilya (Vedic teacher), Sanskrit
- Mahābhārata — Vyāsa, Sanskrit