Indian Philosophy v1.c8.s6.2

v1.c8.s6.2

We have seen how physical phenomena first came to attract attention and were assigned personalities. The deification of natural phenomena has a mischievous influence on religious thought and practice. The world becomes peopled with gods possessed of the human sense of justice and capable of being influenced by the human qualities of hate and love. Many of the gods are not even sufficiently humanised and easily lapse into their past naturalistic condition. Indra, for example, born of waters and cloud, sometimes crashes down from heaven in thunder. Vedic gods, as Bloomfield says, represent “arrested personification.” But even the humanised gods are only crudely personal. They have hands and feet like men. They are given the actual bodily shape, the warring passions of the human breast, the outer polish of a fair skin, and the dignity of a long beard. They fight and feast, drink and dance, eat and rejoice. Some of them are described to be priests in function such as Agni and Bṛhaspati; others are warriors, like Indra and the Maruts. Their food is just the favourite food of man, milk and butter, ghee and grain; their favourite drink is the Soma juice. They have their share of human weakness and are easily pleased by flattery. Sometimes they are so stupidly self-centred that they begin to discuss what they should give. “This is what I will do—not that, I will give him a cow or shall it be a horse? I wonder if I have really had Soma from him."' 1 In their eyes a rich offering is much more efficacious than a sincere prayer. It is a very simple law of give and take that binds gods and men, though the perfect reciprocity governing their relations in the later Brāhmaṇas is yet remote.