Volume II Part 13 (2/2)

** Hibbert Lectures, p. 318.

*** In the _Atharva Veda_ it is said that a female Asura once drew Indra from among the G.o.ds (Muir, v. 82). Thus G.o.ds and Asuras are capable of amorous relations.

**** _Satapatha Br_.

The story in the Brahmana begins by saying that throughout. See the Oxford translation. Praj.a.pati (the producer of things, whose acquaintance we have made in the chapter on cosmogonic myths) was half mortal and half immortal. After creating things endowed with life, he created Death, the devourer. With that part of him which was mortal he was afraid of Death, and the G.o.ds were also ”afraid of this ender, Death”.

The G.o.ds in this tradition are regarded as mortals. Compare the _Black Yajur Veda_:* ”_The G.o.ds were formerly just like men_. They desired to overcome want, misery, death, and to go to the divine a.s.sembly.

They saw, took and sacrificed with this Chaturvimsatiratra, and in consequence overcame want, misery and death, and reached the divine a.s.sembly.” In the same Veda we are told that the G.o.ds and Asuras contended together; the G.o.ds were less numerous, but, as politicians make men peers, they added to their number by placing some bricks in the proper position to receive the sacrificial fire. They then used incantations: ”Thou art a multiplier”; and so the bricks became animated, and joined the party of the G.o.ds, and made numbers more equal.**

* _Taittirya Sanhita_; Muir, v. 15, note 22.

** According to a later legend, or a legend which we have received in a later form, the G.o.ds derived immortality from drinking of the churned ocean of milk. They churned it with Mount Mandara for a staff and the serpent Hasuki for a cord.

The _Ramayana and Mahabharata_ ascribe this churning to the desire of the G.o.ds to become immortal. According to the _Mahabharata_, a Daitya named Rahu insinuated himself among the G.o.ds, and drank some of the draught of immortality.

Vishnu beheaded him before the draught reached lower than his throat; his _head_ was thus immortal, and is now a constellation. He pursues the sun and moon, who had spied him among the G.o.ds, and causes their eclipses by his ferocity. All this is on a level with Australian mythology.

To return to the G.o.ds in the _Satapatha Brahmana_ and their dread of death. They overcame him by certain sacrifices suggested by Praj.a.pati.

Death resented this, and complained that men would now become immortal and his occupation would be gone. To console him the G.o.ds promised that no man in future should become immortal with his body, but only through knowledge after parting with his body. This legend, at least in its present form, is necessarily later than the establishment of minute sacrificial rules. It is only quoted here as an example of the opinion that the G.o.ds were once mortal and ”just like men”. It may be urged, and probably with truth, that this belief is the figment of religious decadence. As to the victory of the G.o.ds over the Asuras, that is ascribed by the _Satapatha Brahmana_* to the fact that, at a time when neither G.o.ds nor Asuras were scrupulously veracious, the G.o.ds invented the idea of speaking the truth. The Asuras stuck to lying. The first results not unnaturally were that the G.o.ds became weak and poor, the Asuras mighty and rich. The G.o.ds at last overcame the Asuras, not by veracity, but by the success of a magical sacrifice. Earlier dynasties of G.o.ds, to which the generation of Indra succeeded, are not unfrequently mentioned in the _Rig- Veda_.**

* Muir, iv. 6a.

** Ibid., v. 16.

On the whole, the accounts of the G.o.ds and of their nature present in Aryan mythology the inconsistent anthropomorphism, and the mixture of incongruous and often magical and childish ideas, which mark all other mythological systems. This will become still more manifest when we examine the legends of the various G.o.ds separately, as they have been disentangled by Dr. Muir and M. Bergaigne from the Vedas, and from the later doc.u.ments which contain traditions of different dates.

The Vedas contain no such orderly statements of the divine genealogies as we find in Hesoid and Homer. All is confusion, all is contradiction.*

In many pa.s.sages heaven and earth, Dyaus and Prithivi, are spoken of as parents of the other G.o.ds. Dyaus is commonly identified, as is well known, with Zeus by the philologists, but his legend has none of the fulness and richness which makes that of Zeus so remarkable. Before the story of Dyaus could become that of Zeus, the old Aryan sky or heaven G.o.d had to attract into his cycle that vast collection of miscellaneous adventures from a thousand sources which fill the legend of the chief h.e.l.lenic deity. In the Veda, Dyaus appears now, as with Prithivi,**

the parent of all, both men and G.o.ds, now as a created thing or being fas.h.i.+oned by Indra or by Tvashtri.*** He is ”essentially beneficent, but has no marked individuality, and can only have become the Greek Zeus by inheriting attributes from other deities ”.****

Another very early divine person is Aditi, the mother of the great and popular G.o.ds called Adityas. ”Nothing is less certain than the derivation of the name of Aditi,” says M. Paul Regnaud.*****

* Certain myths of the beginnings of things will be found in the chapter on cosmogonic traditions.

** Muir, v. 21-24.

*** Ibid., v. 30.

**** Bergaigne, iii. 112.

***** _Revue de l'Histoire des Religions_, xii. 1, 40.

M. Regnaud finds the root of Aditi in _ad_, to s.h.i.+ne. Mr. Max Muller looks for the origin of the word in _a_, privative, and _da_, to bind; thus Aditi will mean ”the boundless,” the ”infinite,” a theory rejected by M. Regnaud. The expansion of this idea, with all its important consequences, is worked out by Mr. Max Muller in his _Hibbert Lectures_.

”The dawn came and went, but there remained always behind the dawn that heaving sea of light or fire from which she springs. Was not this the invisible infinite? And what better name could be given than that which the Vedic poets gave to it, Aditi, the boundless, the yonder, the beyond all and everything.” This very abstract idea ”may have been one of the earliest intuitions and creations of the Hindu mind” (p. 229). M.

Darmesteter and Mr. Whitney, on the other hand, explain Aditi just as Welcker and Mr. Max Muller explain Cronion. There was no such thing as a G.o.ddess named Aditi till men asked themselves the meaning of the t.i.tle of their own G.o.ds, ”the Adityas”. That name might be interpreted ”children of Aditi,” and so a G.o.ddess called Aditi was invented to fit the name, thus philologically extracted from Adityas.*

M. Bergaigne** finds that Aditi means ”free,” ”untrammelled,” and is used both as an adjective and as a name.

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