Vedic Mythology c5.4

c5.4

The indefiniteness of outline caused by the possession of so many common attributes, coupled with the tendency to wipe out the few distinctive ones by assigning nearly every power to every god, renders identification of one god with another easy. Such identifications are as a matter of fact frequent in the RV.¹ Thus a poet addressing the fire-god exclaims: ‘Thou at thy birth, O Agni, art Varuṇa; when kindled thou becomest Mitra, in thee, O son of strength, all gods are centred; thou art Indra to the worshipper’ (5, 3¹). Reflexions in particular on the nature of Agni, so important a god in the eyes of a priesthood devoted to a fire cult, on his many manifestations as individual fires on earth, and on his other aspects as atmospheric fire in lightning and as celestial fire in the sun, aspects which the Vedic poets are fond of alluding to in riddles, would suggest the idea that various deities are but different forms of a single divine being. This idea is found in more than one passage of the RV. ‘The one being priests speak of in many ways; they call it Agni, Yama, Mātariśvan’ (1, 164⁴⁶; cp. AV. 10, 8²⁸. 13, 4¹⁵). ‘Priests and poets with words make into many the bird (= the sun) that is but one’ (10, 114⁵). Thus it appears that by the end of the Rigvedic period a kind of polytheistic monotheism had been arrived at. We find there even the incipient pantheistic conception of a deity representing not only all the gods but nature as well. For the goddess Aditi is identified not only with all the gods, but with men, all that has been and shall be born, air, and heaven (1, 89¹⁰); and Prajāpati is not only the one god above all gods, but embraces all things (10, 121⁸·¹⁰). This pantheistic view becomes fully developed in the AV. (10, 7¹⁴·²⁵) and is explicitly accepted in the later Vedic literature².