The Hieratic Religion—The Pantheon of the Veda

LECTURE THE SECOND.

The Hieratic Religion.—The Pantheon of the Veda.

THE religion which is contained in the bulk of the so-called “revealed” (çrauta) Vedic literature, that is in the main body of the hymns of the Rig-Veda, the Yajur-Veda, the Sama-Veda, and the Brahmanas, is a hieratic or priestly religion. As regards its mechanism, or its external practices, it is unmistakably liturgic or ritualistic. As regards its immediate purpose, or its economic aspect, it is thoroughly utilitarian and practical. Its purpose is to secure happiness and success, health and long life for man, notably the rich man, while living upon the earth; to secure to a very talented and thrifty class of priest-poets abundant rewards in return for their services in procuring for men this happiness, success, and so on; to satisfy the divine powers, visible and invisible, beneficent and noxious, gods and demons, that is, to establish livable relations between gods and men; and, finally, to secure after death the right to share the paradise of the gods in the company of the pious fathers that have gone there before.

For a generation or two since the real beginnings of the study of the Veda, say fifty years ago, and enduring more faintly to the present day, the imagination of scholars thought it saw in the hymns of the Rig-Veda the earliest spontaneous outbursts of the primitive mind, face to face with the phenomena of nature. The poets of the Rig-Veda were supposed to be simple sons of nature. Awe-struck and reverent, they were supposed to be pondering, without ulterior motive of any kind, the meaning of day and night; of dawn, sun, and moon; of sky, thunder, and lightning; of atmosphere and wind; of earth and fire. The Rig-Veda was the “Aryan Bible,” containing the earliest flashes of the religious thought of awakening humanity. This stately gathering of more than a thousand hymns was viewed as a historical collection. Just as the hymns were composed by poets, so the collection and redaction of the Rig-Veda was supposed to have been undertaken by persons of literary taste and redactorial diligence, apparently in order to save these precious monuments for the aesthetic delight of posterity.

One cannot now help wondering to what station in life might have belonged these early poets. I can only think of rhapsodists from out of the people, seized on occasion by the divine frenzy, perchance some village barber—old and semi-religious functionary in the Hindu village—or some village Hans Sachs, “shoemaker and a poet too” as we may translate the German doggerel.¹ Unless, still less likely, Vedic poetry was the child of the muse of some Raja’s poet laureate, “given to infinite tobacco,” eager, as he took the air under one of those huge banyan-trees large enough to hold a village, to bag some good subject for the delectation of the court of his patron. Delightful as might be some such romantic a view to the student of a literature that requires the devotion of a lifetime, it is not the correct view. My own fancy in the earlier days moved along these lines. I am not sure but what some such conception of Vedic literature, faulty as I now believe it to be, drew me into these studies more enticingly than could have the soberer view of ripening years.

I shall endeavor later on to attach the right value to the poetry of the Vedic hymns in the abstract. I shall also show the way in which these poems express a high quality of religious feeling on the part of their composers—Rishis, as they are called in the texts themselves. My endeavor shall not be to minimise the quality of these compositions, but rather to show that they contain the rudiments of a far higher species of thought than these early poets could have dreamt of; thought which in its way, and along its particular avenue, has become final for all time in India, and even outside of India. At present we are engaged with the more external character of the Rig-Veda—its epidermis, as we might say.

The Rig-Veda collection served purely utilitarian purposes. It is in fact a prayer-book whose explanation ought not to be undertaken without reference to definite occasions and definite practices. The main body of the books of the Rig-Veda, the so-called family books,² represents in all probability the prayers of different priestly families on the same or similar occasions, or in connection with the same or similar sacrifices. The Vedic hymns are not quite described even if we designate them as sacrificial poetry. It is a little more than that: I cannot express it better than by saying, it is the sacrifice—to the gods of course—treated poetically. In other words these poems are incidental to the sacrifice. The Vedic poet rises in the early morning to a sacrificial day. The very first natural phenomenon he sees with his own eyes, the glorious maiden Dawn, is at once pressed into service. She trumpets forth, so to say, to the world that this is going to be a day of sacrifice which shall result in wealth and comforts. The day goes on, being a mere scaffolding, or ladder upon whose rungs are placed offerings to the gods. Morning, noon, and evening, tolerably definite gods get their regular allowance of offerings, and a very admirable kind of hymnal praise, namely the hymns of the Rig-Veda. As the gods come on, one after another, or in pairs, or in groups, they enter upon a stage. The stage is the sacrificial day. They are figures in a drama, more important collectively than singly. Take them singly, and I venture to say that even the Rig-Veda, as does the later ritual, begins to show most of them in the state of a sort of supernumeraries on the stage of the sacrifice. India is nothing if not singular. We must not shrink from realising that the earliest Hindu poetry is not epic, nor lyric in the ordinary sense, not idyllic, nor didactic, but that it is almost throughout dominated by a single idea, namely, the praise of the gods in connection with the sacrifice. The sacrifice is the dominant note of Vedic life, as far as it is revealed in these ancient documents. The chief acts of the people living this life, in so far as it is revealed by the literature are sacrificial; their chief thought the praise and conciliation of their gods at the sacrifice. The soma, the sacred drink, intoxicates the gods into heroism, or the rich melted butter, or ghee (ghṛta), that is poured into the willing fire, fattens them into contentment. Especially the soma is ever present, in express statement or by implication. So much so that in a technical sense at least the Rig-Veda religion may be designated as a religion of soma-practices.

But the hymns are dithyrambic, often turgid and intentionally mystic. It requires at times pretty sharp sight to see, and a clear head to remember, that this poetry hugs the sacrifice closely; that at the bottom of the golden liquid of inspiration there are always the residual dregs of a supposedly useful formalism. In fact the poets, as their fancy flies away from their immediate purpose, succeed uncommonly well in withdrawing the eye from the trivial real properties of the sacrifice to the luminous gods whom they praise so well.

The most beautiful hymns of the Rig-Veda are addressed to Ushas or Aurora, the maiden Dawn, the Goddess Dawn, the daughter of Dyaush Pitar—(Zeus πατήρ, Father Heaven—Homer’s Rose-finger Eos. A poet sings her ecstatically:

“We have crossed to the other side of darkness, Gleaming Aurora hath prepared the way. Delightful as the rhythm of poem,¹ she smiles and shines, To happiness her beauteous face aroused us.” (Rig-Veda i. 92. 6.)

We feel that we are going to be held willing captives of a primitive Shelley or Keats, until we are sobered by another stanza of the same hymn (stanza 5):

“Her bright sheen hath shown itself to us; She spreads, and strikes the black dire gloom. As one paints the sacrificial post at the sacrifice, So hath Heaven’s daughter put on her brilliance.”

What a comparison! The petty sacrificial post (svaru), destined to hold fast an animal victim, gaudily ornamented with paint—it is described technically as having a knob for a head, along with sundry other barbaric beauties—brings us down with a thud from heaven to the mockeries of the sacrifice. Our good friend the poet is after all a monger in technical rites who cannot, even in the moment of his inspiration, quite forget his trade. Lest we think that just this particular poet has nodded for a moment, another hymn repeats the, to us, offensive comparison:

“The bright Dawns have risen in the East, Like sacrifice posts uplifted at the sacrifice. Luminous, pure, and clear, they have unbarred The portals of the stable of darkness.” (Rig-Veda 4. 51. 2.)

We may turn this about the other way and prove the example. Just as it is possible for a brilliant poet of the Rig-Veda to institute comparisons between glorious Dawn and the tawdry sacrifice post, so it is possible for another poet to consider the sacrifice post as a subject fit for high poetic treatment. We are accustomed to make allowance for symbolism in connection with articles belonging to ritual, but I question whether the poets of any other land have ever turned their talents to such curious use:

Rig-Veda 3. 8.

1. “God-serving men, O sovereign of the forest!² With heavenly mead at sacrifice anoint thee. Grant wealth to us when thou art standing upright, And when reposing on this Mother’s¹ bosom!

2. “Set up in front of the enkindled fire, Accepting tireless prayer, that brings strong sons, Driving far from us away all noisome sickness, Lift thyself up to bring us great good fortune!

3. “Well-robed, enveloped, he is come, the youthful; Springing to life his glory waxeth greater. Contemplative in mind and god-adoring, Sages of wise intellect upraise him.

4. “Like swans that fly in ordered line Have come the pillars gay in brilliant colors. They, lifted up on high by sages, eastward, Go forth as gods to the gods’ dwelling-places.

5. “These posts upon the earth, with ornate knobs, Seem to the eye like horns of horned cattle. Upraised by priests with rival invocations, Let them assist us in the rush of battle!

6. “Lord of the world, rise with a hundred branches— With thousand branches may we rise to greatness— Thou whom this hatchet with an edge well whetted For great felicity hath brought before us!”

I am reminded here of the tense struggle in which my friend the late Professor Max Müller was engaged with an epithet of Ushas, quite startling, I admit, at first sight. The same beautiful Daughter of Heaven, in another hymn, is called Dakshiṇā. Now the word dakshiṇā means “sacrificial fee,” or, in plainer words, it is the baksheesh of the priests at the sacrifice. But it did not seem tolerable to Müller’s poetic mind that a poet might degrade so charming a theme by such a comparison:

“Up the shining strands of Dawn have risen, Like unto glittering waves of water! All paths prepareth she that they be easily traversed; Liberal goddess, kind, she hath become baksheesh.” (Rig-Veda 64. 6. i.)

The word which I have just rendered by “liberal goddess” (maghoni) is the very one that is used constantly and technically for the patron of the sacrifice (maghavan), the immediate source from which flow all the fees of the sacrifice. In its feminine form (maghoni) it is used almost solely as an epithet of Dawn. Here it is, cheek by jowl with dakshiṇā. Ushas is the patroness of the sacrifice; she is herself the sacrifice fee, because she heralds or ushers in the sacrificial day¹ after the darkness of the night, when both liberal and stingy are asleep. If I could get myself to suspect one of these ancient Rishis of humor, I should say that there was a touch of humor—anyhow it is unconscious humor—in the following appeal to Ushas: “Arouse, O Ushas, liberal goddess, them that give; the niggards shall sleep unawakened!”² That is to say, what is the use of waking the stingy man, he is not going to give us anything anyhow. Another stanza states this even more emphatically: “O shining Dawns, ye liberal goddesses, do ye to-day suggest to the rich that they shall give bounty! Let the stingy, unawakened, sleep in the depths of obscure darkness!”³

The very first hymn in the Rig-Veda that is addressed to Ushas presents in its opening strain the ritual, serving, economic goddess, in an inextricable tangle with the poetic divinity. Almost do we feel that economic advantage and aesthetic delight are much the same thing to the soul of such a poet:

“With pleasant things for us, O Ushas, Shine forth, O Daughter of Heaven, With great and brilliant wealth, of which, O luminous goddess, thou art the giver!” (Rig-Veda i. 68. i.)

And immediately after, in the next stanza, the significant words, “Arouse thou the benevolence of our patrons!” And so another time,⁴ “To these nobles give thou glory and fine sons, O patroness Dawn, to them that have given us gifts that are not shabby!” And once again,⁵ “God after god urge thou on to favor us; make all pleasant things come our way; and, as thou shinest forth, create in us the inspiration that leads to gain!” That is to say, make our poetry so clever that it shall not fail to stimulate the liberality of the patron of the sacrifice!

We can now understand the tour de force of the poet-priest who, when he sings of Dawn, is anxious above all that the main issue shall not be neglected. Therefore he blurts out his crassest thought first, afflicts the goddess with the doubtfully honorable title baksheesh, and then settles down to a very nice appreciation of his poetic opportunity:

“Baksheesh’s roomy chariot hath been harnessed, And the immortal gods have mounted on it, The friendly Dawn, wide-spread, from out of darkness Has risen up to care for the abode of mortals.

“The mighty goddess arose before all the creatures, She wins the booty and always conquers riches; The Dawn looks forth, young and reviving ever, She came the first here to our morning offering.” (Rig-Veda i. 123. 1, 2.)

I think my hearers will understand that it is not necessary to regard the word dakshinā, with Professor Max Müller, as a vague honorific adjective of Dawn, in the sense of “clever,” or the like.³ Nor need we in this instance to go to the school of the late great French interpreter of the Rig-Veda, Abel Bergaigne, who, in a fashion quite his own, transports too many of the events in the earthly life of the Vedic Hindu to heaven. He sees clearly enough that dakshinā means “sacrifice fee,” and nothing else, but opines that Dawn is called dakshinā because she is the gift of heaven bestowed upon pious men as a recompense for their piety.⁴ This is all too roundabout, and unnecessary, and un-Vedic. Still less can we assent to the statement of another very sane and enlightened critic of the Vedas, Professor Oldenberg, who declares that “the hymns to Dawn waft to us the poetry of the early morn; that they steer clear of the mystic sophistries of sacrifice technique; and that they have a charm that is wanting in the sacrificial hymns proper.”⁵ Professor Oldenberg takes the usual view of this interesting goddess. I would advocate precisely the opposite view, namely, that the hymns to Dawn, their many intrinsic beauties to the contrary notwithstanding, represent the first, the keenest, so to speak, the least tired sacrificial mood of these poet-priests as they enter upon the absorbing business of the day; and that never has the battledoor and shuttlecock of really fine poetic inspiration and plain self-engrossed human neediness been played so frankly and undisguisedly by poet—who must first live and afterwards compose poetry.

Once more I must tax your patience and return to Dawn’s epithet dakshinā, or “baksheesh.” In Rig-Veda 3. 58. 1 Dawn, under the name of Dakshinā is called the Daughter of Heaven, and Agni, the God of Fire, is called the Son of Dakshinā. What is really meant is, that Agni is the son of Dawn. We have here a double ritual touch which becomes clear only through deep sympathy with the economy of the sacrifice. Why should Agni, “Fire,” be the son of Dawn? Is it that Dawn means “light,” and light is fire? That would be the far-fetched poetic derivation; I wish to accuse no scholar of having made it. Poetically we think of fire especially as an evening phenomenon, not as a phenomenon of the sober morning. I doubt whether the farmer, as he splits kindling for the breakfast fire of a cold winter morning, cheers himself with the poetic thought that the breakfast fire is the son of Dawn. Our farmers are not temperamentally inclined that way. But it is another matter with the sacrificer who must beautify and beatify all his acts, and throw into them a dash of cajolery. The fact is that the god Agni is also a prized and much extolled divinity of the morning, because the first act of the sacral day is to kindle the fire that shall convey the oblations to the other gods. This is so familiar a fact of Vedic religion as to require no illustration. The truly significant thing is, that it creates a theme in the poetic treatment of the sacrifice, namely: Agni is the son of Dawn, because immediately after Goddess Dawn is beheld God Fire is kindled. In a beautiful hymn to God Savitar, the motive or promotive power behind the sun, the doings of the early morn are described in real poetry:

“Weaving Night hath folded up her woof, In the midst of her performance wise Savitar suspends her work. He riseth from his couch and sets the seasons, With fitting plan God Savitar hath come hither.”

“The scattered homes and all life The mighty flame of household fire pervadeth. The largest share the Mother has decreed unto her Son; To do his own desire god Savitar hath sped hither.” (Rig-Veda 2. 38. 4, 5.)

Let us not, by any means, imagine that the Mother here is the unselfish human mother who sees to it that her boy Devadatta, or whatever his name may be, has a substantial breakfast. No, it is the Mother Dawn whose Son Agni would as a matter of fact get the largest share anyway, because all oblations are poured into the fire. We must, I think, acknowledge that never has sacrifice had such genuine poetry to serve it. But the reverse of the coin is, that never has poetic endowment strayed so far from wholesome theme as to fritter itself away upon the ancient hocus-pocus of the fire-priest and medicine-man. Of course, what finally saves this poetry from banality is the presence in it of those same luminous gods whose brilliance is obscured but not extinguished by such childish treatment.

We are now better prepared to bear up under the statement that Vedic religion is from the very first moment practical and utilitarian, and that the Vedic people, to begin with, practise their religion for what there is in it. The Rig-Veda with its worship of the great nature-gods represents from the start a form of worship very similar, though apparently neither as extensive nor as formal and rigid as the later technical ritual of the Yajur-Vedas and the Brahmanas. The poetry of the Rig-Veda is in the main also really dull and mechanical, but we have seen that, in good part, it is leavened by true beauty of conception, fineness of observation, and all the circumstances of literary composition which we of modern times are accustomed to see at work with its eyes shut—or half shut—to practical considerations. We must not be misled by these mental defects of the Vedic poets into an exaggeratedly pessimistic view of their entire activity. A great diplomatist, upon whom depends the destiny of his country, may be shrewd, unscrupulous, Machiavellian, velvet as to glove, iron as to hand, and yet be a real patriot. Even so a priestly religion of works, trivial as these works may appear to our eyes, does not shut out spiritual elevation. Nor does practical poetry shut out entirely the more silent workings of literary taste and poetic inspiration. The Vedic poets themselves insist upon it, their poems are “well-hewn,” “well-fashioned as a war-chariot from the hands of a skilled artisan.” And so they are in many cases: if we cut out the foolish sacrifice, and pare down a pretty thick crust of conventionalism, there is left in the Vedic hymns enough of beauty and character to secure them a place in the world’s literature. Forget but the string that ties the thought of the Vedic Rishis to the sacrificial post, and you shall see that thought flit far away to great heights, where birds do not fly.⁶ For the time being, at least, it becomes what we call inspired, and, anyhow, it breeds the germs that shall flower out to great things in future days, when Hindu thought finally emancipates itself from sacrifice along with many other trivialities of life.

The religion of the Rig-Veda, much like the later hieratic religion of the Yajur-Veda and the Brahmanas, is the religion of the upper classes. Even to this day only rich Brahmanical Hindus are in the position to perform Vedic sacrifices. So it was in olden times. The popular religion, the religion of the poor, or of the modest householder, with its humble rites, and its even more childish reliance upon sorcery and the medicine-man, runs from the start side by side with the hieratic religion. It is the religion of the Atharva-Veda and the so-called “House-books.”⁷ It happens to lie outside of the scope of these lectures, though I have for my part been drawn on by its simple yet tense humanity to the publication of several volumes.⁸ The religion of the Rig-Veda presupposes an established household of considerable extent; a wealthy and liberal householder; elaborate and expensive materials; and many priests not at all shamefaced about their fees.

In fact the body of the Rig-Veda presupposes the ordinary form of the soma sacrifice which extends through an entire day, in the manner of the so-called jyotishtoma of the later ceremonial. Or, rather, it is largely a collection of the hymns composed by various priest families for this important sacrifice. The soma drink is pressed three times daily: morning, noon, and evening. The gods of the Vedic Pantheon are all interested in these ceremonies; each has a fairly definite share in them. Indra, the god who figures more frequently than any other, has part in all three pressings; but the mid-day pressing belongs to him exclusively. Ushas, the Maiden Dawn, and Agni, God Fire, play, as we have seen, a very important part in the morning. The Ādityas⁹ and Ribhus, the latter a sort of clever-handed elves, appear upon the scene in the evening. A host of hymns are addressed to pairs of divinities whose coupling is not always based upon any special natural affinity between them, but upon purely liturgic association: Indra and Agni, Indra and Varuna, Agni and Soma, and so on.

One important class of hymns, the so-called āpri-hymns, that is, “songs of invitation,” consist of individual stanzas which invoke certain divinities and personifications of acts and utensils, preliminary to the sacrifice of cattle at the soma rites.¹⁰ God Fire (Agni) is especially called upon under different, partly mystic designations; of sacrificial articles, the sacred straw upon which the priests are seated, the doors of the enclosure within which the offering takes place, and the sacrificial post to which the animal is tied have a stanza each in every one of the ten āpri-hymns. These sets of invocations are purely liturgical; each set belongs to a different family of Rishis or “seers.” In general, each of the so-called “family books” of the Rig-Veda has its āpri-hymn. A peculiar odor of sanctity, solemnity, and family pride must have attached itself to these formulas. In later times, when the hymns of the Rig-Veda are taken in lump, and employed at the great sacrifices with but very slight reference to the particular priest family from which they are supposed to have been derived, the choice of the āpri-hymns is still made according to family. The ritual books at that time still order that the sacrificer must choose that āpri-hymn which was composed in the family of the Rishi from whom he would fain derive his descent.¹¹ It seems likely, therefore and for other reasons, that each family book of the Rig-Veda was intended for essentially the same class of practices, carried on according to different family traditions, and to the accompaniment of different hymns, somewhat in the manner of the later Vedic schools or branches (śākhā) of one and the same Veda.

Large numbers of technical, ritualistic words and expressions crowd the pages of the Rig-Veda. Its metres are finished and conventional to a very high degree; they are also, to some extent, distributed among the gods, so that a given metre is associated especially with a certain god. For instance, the gāyatrī is the metre of the god Agni; the trishtubh the metre of the god Indra. They are also distributed to some extent according to the time of the day: the gāyatrī in the morning, the trishtubh at noon, the jagatī at evening. Above all, the advanced character of the Rig-Veda’s ritual manifests itself in the large number of different designations for priests. These occur not only singly, but in series: the names of these priests are largely, though not entirely, the names of the priests of the later ceremonial.¹²

And yet the poetry of the Rig-Veda is, in a deeper sense, original. It is primitive religious poetry, if by primitive we mean uninterrupted contact with the last source of its inspiration. The final judgment of its character, after all, depends not so much upon the economic motives, or the all-around personal character of its authors as upon the extent and quality of their mental vision. To treat sacrificial themes in the high poetic way seems to most of us hollow mockery. But we must not forget that such performances, to some extent, continue the pious ways of the fathers; that the acts in part symbolise real religious feeling; and that most religions have a trick of throwing a poetic and sentimental glamor around practices that are trivial intrinsically. Then the difference of standards in a semi-barbarous time, such as the time of the Rig-Veda, must count for something. After all that I have said to forefend what may be called a padded or swollen estimate of Rig-Veda poetry and religion, both the poetry and the religion are of singular interest and importance. In its essence the Rig-Veda is not liturgy but mythology. Its priest-poets, in their heart of hearts, are not mere technicians, but tense observers of the great facts and acts of nature, and worshippers of the powers whom they fancy at work in nature. In fact they are both poets and philosophers. There is in this matter some real cause for surprise. We must not forget the long, almost indefinite past of Hindu mythology and religion. I shall endeavor to make this clear in the next lecture when we come to deal with the reconstructions of comparative mythology. There was plenty of time for all nature-worship to have stiffened into mere admiration, fear, and adulation of personal gods, accompanied inevitably by a more or less complete forgetfulness of the forces in nature from which sprang the gods. That this was not so is due, in my opinion, to the vast impressiveness of India’s nature. Its fiercely glowing sun, its terrible yet life-giving monsoons, the snow-mountain giants of the north, and its bewilderingly profuse vegetation could hardly fail to keep obtruding themselves as a revelation of the powers of the already existing gods.

What is still more important, it could hardly fail to stimulate the creation of new nature-gods to a degree unknown elsewhere. It is this unforgetting adherence to nature that has made the Vedic hymns the training-school of the Science of Mythology, and to a large extent also of the Science of Religion. Deprived of the hymns of the Rig-Veda, we should hardly know to this day that mythology is the first and fundamental adjustment of the individual human life to the outer active, interfering, dynamic world, which surrounds and influences man from the moment when he opens his eyes upon the wonders of its unexplained phenomena. In this sense Vedic mythology is in its day what empirical science is in our day.

We can realise this to some extent by calling up another mythology, that of the Greeks. This is also based upon nature, but nature is soon forgotten, or, if not entirely forgotten, much obscured by after-born movements. Owing to a curious slip, fortunate from the artistic side, unfortunate from the religious and mythical side, Greek mythology fell too completely into the hands of the people. Poets, artists, and even philosophers handle it, each in their own way. But there is a notable absence of those Rishis of the Veda who, with all their too human sordidness and all their Hindu fancifulness see the great realities of the world with their eyes wide open, and work their way slowly but with secure touch from the single and separate manifestations of nature in the Rig-Veda to the absolute One Being which is nature as a whole, that is the idea of unity as finally settled in the Upanishads. The finest flower of Greek mythology, great Zeus, of whom Hesiod says, πάντα ἰδών ὀφθαλμός καί πάντα νοήσας, “The eye of Zeus which sees all and knows all,” or of whom the old Orphic hymn sings, Ζεύς ἀρχή, Ζεύς μέσσα, Δῖος δ’ἐν πάντα τέτυκται, “Zeus is the beginning, Zeus is the middle, on Zeus all is founded,” is at the same time the flippant, breezy Jove to whom the poets ascribe foibles and vices barely excusable in a modern bon-vivant and man about town. Too finished personification causes the break-down of Greek mythology even from the artistic side. The same poets in whom we praise above all aversion to everything excessive or monstrous, those Greek poets who in general fancy and say just enough, but not too much, run a close race with the most extravagant fancies of semi-civilised peoples in the description of their primeval gods. Uranos was maimed by his own son, Kronos; Kronos, the unnatural son, is also an unnatural father. For he swallows his own children, and, after years of tentative but unsuccessful digestion, vomits forth the whole brood. Fair Phoebus Apollo hangs Marsyas on a tree and flays him alive. Homicide without end, parricide and murder of children are the stock events of their mythology. No wonder that Plato banished even the Homeric poems from his ideal republic. And Epicurus had to say: “The gods are indeed, but they are not as many believe them to be. Not he is an infidel who denies the gods of the many, but he that fastens upon the gods the opinions of the many.” Nothing so much as the complete humanisation of Greek mythology paved the way for the rapid spread of that Shemitic religion, deeply ethical in its teachings, Judaeo-Christianity, among the Indo-European peoples.

You may remember how skilfully Kingsley’s novel, Hypatia pictures Greek religion when it confronts in final struggle, already in the throes of death, the growing belief of the future, as still the Homeric theology; that is, crude anthropomorphism, dashed with occasional but troubled visions of better things. The real rivals of Christianity in the centuries after Christ were Persian forms of religion: Mithraism and Manicheism. Of Mithraism Ernest Renan once said that if the world had not been Christianised it would have been Mithraised; and Manicheism, dualistic, exhaustively Gnostic, with its superb colouring and its appealing asceticism, proved for a time an even more dangerous rival of Christianity.

We know from the history of the later classical Sanskrit literature that India’s climate and physiography have kept her poets in touch with nature to a degree unknown elsewhere, until we come to the modern nature poets. Even so, the transparency of the Vedic Pantheon as a whole remains surprising. This results in what we may call arrested personification, or arrested anthropomorphism, and this is the very genius of Vedic religion, and more especially of the religion of the Rig-Veda. Nothing so much as this has enabled the early Hindu thinkers to think out anew, a second and a third time, what had been apparently settled to everybody’s final satisfaction, and was beginning to enter upon a career of rigmarole. Thus the Rig-Veda says of God Savitar, the sun conceived as the promoter of life: “God Savitar, approaching on the dark blue sky, sustaining mortals and immortals, comes on his golden chariot, beholding all the worlds.”¹ It is the fiery ball that rises from the sea or over the hills, nothing more in the first place. The ordinary way of mythology would be to make of this Savitar a wonderful charioteer, given over, say, to racing or to warlike deeds. Instead, this process is, as I say, arrested. The natural phenomenon remains the repository of renewed and deepening thought. Even in the Rig-Veda itself the conception of the sun makes great onward strides as the most prominent symbol of the ultimate force at work in the universe. Another stanza, speaking of Surya, another sun-god, says, “The sun is the Self or Soul of all that moves or stands.”² And yet another, the famous so-called Savitri, or Gāyatrī, which remains sacro-sanct at all times, and is recited daily even now by every orthodox Hindu,³ again turns to Savitar:

“That lovely glory of Savitar, The heavenly god, we contemplate: Our pious thoughts he shall promote.”¹

Here is almost the first touch of that inimitable combination of the Upanishads, the Ātman, “breath,” and the Brahma, “holy thought,” that is the combination of physical and spiritual force into one pantheistic all. As a modern Hindu says of the Savitri:² “It is of course impossible to say what the author of the Savitri had in view, but his Indian commentators, both ancient and modern, are as one in believing that he rose from nature up to nature’s God, and adored that sublime luminary which is visible only to the eye of reason, and not the planet we daily see in its course.” Kātyāyana in his Index to the Rig-Veda, the so-called Anukramanī, after stating the familiar classification of all the gods of the Veda into three types—Agni (fire and light on earth), Vāyu (air or wind in the atmosphere), and Surya (sun in the sky)—proceeds still farther to assert that there is only one deity, namely, the “Great Self,” (mahānātmā), and “some say that he is the sun (surya) or that the sun is he.” This is, of course, later thought, Upanishad thought, as it appears, for instance, in the Taittiriya Upanishad (8. 8): “He who dwells in man and he who dwells in the sun are one and the same.” But this later thought is founded on the repeated revision, so to say, of the conceptions of the sun, fed anew by the sight of this engrossing nature force, which is not obscured and not made trivial by personification into an Olympian, human god.

But we shall return to this all-important matter when we come to the highest outcome of Vedic religion. It is now time to take a look at the individual gods of the Veda, or what we may call the Vedic Pantheon.

Footnotes

THE PANTHEON OF THE VEDA

At the outset we may observe that this word applies to the Vedic gods only in an analogical sense. There is no Pantheon in the Veda, if by Pantheon we mean an Olympus patterned after a more or less snobbish conception of a royal household, in which every god holds his position and exacts sensitive respect from all the others as the price of his own observance of court proprieties. The Vedic gods have no acknowledged head. They group themselves to some extent according to their characters; for instance, as sun-gods, or storm-gods. As such they have more or less definite habitations. In the time of the great Epic, the Mahabharata, no one knows how many hundreds of years later, they really do manage to foregather in the heaven of one of them, namely, Indra’s heaven. They begin to take rank: Indra first, Agni second, and so on. With that comes a little, very little, of those roseate poetic and plastic possibilities which the poets and artists of all ages have read into the finishedly human Greek Olympus. We have seen enough of our theme to know that many gods of the Veda are scarcely more than half persons, their other half being an active force of nature. Such material is not yet ripe even for a Hindu Olympus. The mind of the Vedic poet is the rationalistic mind of the ruminating philosopher, rather than the artistic mind which reproduces the finished product. It is engaged too much in reasoning about and constantly altering the wavering shapes of the gods, so that these remain to the end of Vedic time too uncertain in outline, too fluid in substance for the modelling hand of the artist. On a pinch we could imagine a statue of the most material of the Vedic gods, Indra; but it is hard to imagine a statue of the god Varuna. As a matter of fact there is no record of Vedic ikons, or Vedic temples. In all these senses there is no Vedic Pantheon.

It would seem possible to present the Vedic gods in the order of their importance, but many are equally, or nearly equally, important. We find nearly a dozen of them engaged in creating the world, and rather more than a dozen engaged in producing the sun, placing it on the sky, or preparing a path for it; under these circumstances it is not easy to rank them.¹ The gods have not all of them come into existence at the same time. Some belong to Indo-European times; others to Indo-Iranian times. Of the rest some come from an earlier, some from a later period of the Veda. If we had all the dates we might try a chronological arrangement pure and simple, but we do not have all the dates.

A celebrated ancient Hindu glossographer and etymologer of the name of Yaska reports three lists, respectively of 32, 36, and 31 gods, or semi-divine beings.² The last of these seems to begin to tell us in what succession the Vedic gods appear on the stage day by day, especially in the morning.³ He begins well with the Acvins, or “Horsemen” (the Vedic Dioscuri),⁴ Ushas, the Goddess Dawn, and Surya, the “Sun-Maiden.”⁵ Soon, however, he grows problematic, or dunder-headed, with Vrishakapayi, Saranyu, Tvashtar, and so on. Many years’ occupation with the writings of this worthy, whose sense and erudition are valued much by the Hindus, as well as by Western scholars, have not increased my belief in his authority, or decreased my faith in the infinite possibilities of his ineptitude. Still this procession of the gods along the hours of the day has great interest for the Vedic ritual and the explanation of the gods themselves. Touches of it appear in the hymns themselves, as when the Rig-Veda⁶ groups very neatly the gods of the morning:

“Agni awoke upon the earth, and Surya riseth; Broad gleaming Dawn hath shone in brilliance. The Acvins twain have yoked their car to travel. God Savitar hath roused the world in every place.”

There is another, more permanent traditional Hindu division of the gods which arranges them in three classes, mostly of eleven each, according to their place or habitat in nature or the cosmos, that is, in sky, mid-air, and earth. The classification is first made in Rig-Veda I. 139. 11: to some extent it remains good ever after. This topography of nature has a strong hold on the early religion: times without end the later Vedic texts insist that Agni, “Fire” belongs to, or is typical of the earth; Vata or Vayu, “Wind,” of the mid-air, and Surya, “Sun,” of the sky.⁷ So far it is the philosophy of the obvious. They continue cleverly along that line in the following arrangement. I state only the more important members of each class:

Celestial gods: Dyaus or Dyaush Pitar (“Sky” or “Father Sky”), Varuna, Mitra, Surya and the Adityas, Savitar, Pushan, Vishnu, Ushas, and the Acvins.⁸

Atmospheric gods: Vata or Vayu (“Wind”) Indra, Parjanya, Rudra, and the Maruts.

Terrestrial gods: Prithivi (“Earth”), Agni, and Soma.

This threefold division, in order to be consistent, would have to be carried on to the end, so as to include all the gods. As a matter of fact it is uncertain in many places, even when carried no farther. We are not so certain as are the Hindus that Indra, for instance, is a god of the mid-air,⁹ even though we must admire this, on the whole successful, appreciation of the place in nature that belongs to a goodly proportion of the chief gods.

There are yet other possibilities which need not be mentioned, because we shall not follow their lead. Our own course, doubtless open to some objection, will be eclectic. We shall call up the more important Vedic gods under such various points of view as will bring out some one salient quality—which does not say that they may not have other qualities of great interest. Thus the chronological element must remain immensely important. The chronology of the gods must influence to some extent our judgment of this ancient religion of the Veda. The old prehistoric gods that have been imported by the Aryas into India, no matter how much they have been Hinduised, will necessarily have characteristics of their own. Next come the gods which have been coined in hot haste out of the phenomena of nature in a glowing subtropical climate, or have been imbued anew with the vitality of India’s imposing nature. These have not had time to forget their own origin—they are, as I have called them, the gods of arrested personification or arrested anthropomorphism. They are the beacon lights of Vedic religion, of Comparative Mythology, and of the Science of Religion. They are the rare guides and philosophers on this labyrinthine and rocky road; they have made the Veda the training-school of the study of religion. Since they show in a given number of cases just what has taken place, they point the way when the light becomes hazy.

Again, it is still as true as ever that a large number of the gods, whether early or late, are nature-gods whose origin, we regret to say, has been somewhat obscured by later processes. They again make up for the student of the Veda a class, the most important as well as the most difficult theme of investigation. Every nation’s mythology must contain gods of this class. They bring with them problems that will never be dismissed until they are finally answered—and that, paradoxically, may never be. I have in mind gods like Varuna, Indra, and the Acvins. To some Vedic scholars it seems without doubt begging the question to speak of nature-gods in cases when we do not know for certain what was the natural object that was personified. No one can say at this time that the origin of either Varuna, Indra, or the Agvins has been definitely settled. Yet, for my part I confess to that faith, because I remember that such uncertainty represents in truth the normal result of mythologic development. As a rule, a nature-god does not remain transparent for ever: the opposite happens far more frequently, as may be seen, again and again, in Hellenic or Teutonic mythology. Really durable myths are, as a rule, mixed myths, and, therefore, more or less obscure myths. A certain amount of the complications and entanglements of human life must be imported into mythology before it becomes mythology. Otherwise it remains philosophy, primitive cosmic philosophy, or primitive empirical natural science.

Let me paraphrase a statement made some years ago in a learned journal.¹⁰ Mythological investigation must draw a sharp line between the primary attributes of a mythic personage which are the cause of the personification, and the attributes and events which are assigned to him or her, and are supposed to happen after the personification had been completed. Zeus, as we all know, originally meant “sky,” and Zeus pater was the personified “Father Sky,” contrasted with “Mother Earth.” But it would be foolish to search for these primary qualities of Zeus or the other Greek gods in a play of Euripides, where the gods are afflicted with all the passions and weaknesses of mortal men. Yet he who refuses to mythologise on the basis of Euripides’ treatment need not therefore be sceptical about the naturalistic origin of most of the Greek gods; he may be willing at the right time, and in the right stage of the history of any myth, to point out the physical factors or the physical events which gave it a start. But to be present at the right time, that is not always so easy.

Further, there are gods in the Veda—not too many in number—about whose origin we can determine nothing that is either definite or helpful. Either these gods have been obscured totally by later events in their natural history, or they are derived from aboriginal tribes or other foreign sources about which we know nothing at all.

Keeping in mind this idea of genesis, we might divide the gods into three classes: transparent, translucent, and opaque gods. And being by nature and occupation philosophically inclined, plagued by an incontinent desire to find last causes, I shall follow the lead of these my suggestions, and describe the gods from the point of view of their origin and the rationale of their being under five heads:

1. Prehistoric gods, whether their origin be clear or obscure.
2. Transparent, half-personified gods, who are at the same time nature objects and mythic persons.
3. Translucent gods, who impose upon the investigator the theory of their origin in nature.
4. Opaque gods, who refuse to reveal their origins.
5. To these may be added, as a fifth class, the abstract or symbolic gods who embody an action, a wish, or a fear in the shape of a good or evil divinity,

god, or demon. Of this class our fifth lecture will furnish abundant illustration.¹

Fortunately it does not fall within the province of these lectures to exhaust the long-drawn and monotonous theme of Vedic mythology, or to establish definitely the precise origin of all the gods. My object is to sketch the motives and principles that underlie the remarkable chain of religious ideas that leads from the ritual worship of the great nature-gods of the Rig-Veda to the high theosophy of the Upanishads. Mythology pervades this development to a very great extent, so that we must understand its principles. But a mythic figure more or less cannot materially change the picture, when once we know how mythic figures in general are fabricated, and then overlaid with religious feeling and advancing religious thought. The particular character of the individual god soon becomes unimportant. One of the most remarkable facts in the religion of the Veda, when carried to its legitimate conclusion, is, that these multiple gods really vanish in the end, after they have contributed their individual attributes to the great idea of unity, of oneness at the root of the universe. This is the very negation of mythology and Pantheons; of sacrificial hocus-pocus and poetic fable. And when the twilight has engulfed these gods, then, and not until then, in India as elsewhere, do real religion and real philosophy begin.