LECTURE THE FOURTH.

The Transparent, Translucent, and Opaque Gods.—Religious Conceptions and Religious Feeling in the Veda.

The transparent gods: their importance for the study of religion — Father Sky and Daughter Dawn — Surya, a god of the sun — Vata and Vayu, gods of wind — The most transparent god: Agni, Fire — Agni as the sacrifice fire — Prehistoric gods of fire — Birth and youth of Agni — Agni as god of the morning — New births of Agni — Agni on the altar, the agent of the gods — Priesthood and divinity of Agni — A hymn to Agni — Other myths of the Fire God — The translucent gods: definition of the term — God Vishnu — God Pushan — God Indra, as an example of an opaque god — Traditional explanation of the myth of Indra and Vritra — Professor Hillebrandt’s interpretation of the same myth — Renewed definition of the religion of the Rig-Veda — Renewed definition of Vedic practicalities — Conflicting prayers and sacrifices — The conception of faith — Faith related to Truth and Wisdom — Faith personified — Faith and works — The reward for faith postponed to heaven — Contrast between early “faith” (craddha) and later “devotion” (bhakti) — “Gift-praises,” another sop to the sacrificer — The religious feeling of the Rig-Veda — The utilitarian sense — The glory of the gods — Absence of real sentiment towards the gods — Poetic inspiration the true religious feeling — The complacent master-singers — The poets’ own estimate of their work — The divine quality of devotion.

FOR my part I always come to this theme in the spirit of scientific elation. You know from preceding statements what I mean by transparent gods. They are the gods who are at one and the same time nature object and person. In other words, they are mythic formations whose personification is arrested by the continued action and the vivid memory of the very qualities which lead to personification. Figuratively speaking, just when the chemical is about to precipitate or to crystallise into something unrecognisable, and far removed from its elements, it is shaken and dissolved anew. We are spared the labor of a qualitative and quantitative analysis. In the midst of the uncertainties and intricacies of this subject as a whole the assurance that these processes renew the courage of the investigator. There is hope that out of the Babel of discordant opinions, many of them grown on the soil of just scepticism, the gods and the beliefs of ethnic religions will reveal their origins. I believe that, next to the Science of Language, the Science of Religion, is the clearest of mental or historical sciences, for the very reason that it is possible to trace some of the most advanced products of religious thought to simple and tangible beginnings in nature and in human consciousness.

Comparative mythology has influenced these studies profoundly by extending the field and the time within which we may carry on our observations. At the risk of seeming too insistent, let me point out once more, how it has spanned the distance between prehistoric “Father Sky” and the strenuous human personality of the Olympian Zeus of the poets. Now a visit to the Vedic Pantheon brings us into the very workshop where the gods are made. We have encountered before some transparent gods. “Father Sky” (Dyaush Pitar), who comes from olden times, and does not grow in the Veda into anything like the personality of Greek Zeus Pater, but is there submerged by other formations that have gained ground at his expense. We have seen what his daughter Ushas is: Eternally young and beautiful, ageless in distinction from the withering race of man, she appears as a lovely maiden displaying her charms to the world. While doing this she caters at the same time to interests which are the reverse of poetic. She starts the day of sacrifice, her face set towards very practical performances. She secures rewards for pious men and their agents with the gods, namely the priests. Yet, on the whole, the poetic possibilities of this loveliest of nature sights gain the day. She releases from service her sister Night as she rises from the darkened East higher and higher to flood heaven and earth with her waves of light. To the Sun-God she is a bride, opens for him her bosom’s splendor. Or, she loves the two Açvins, the Dioscuri, with whom she travels on their car drawn by birds. Divine and gracious maiden, but yet no more than one of nature’s splendors, she is the type of many a heaven-born story, could we but read it aright.

Next Surya (Sol, Helios) appears upon the stage. He is the Sun-God treated as transparently as possible. He is styled the son of Dyaus, the Father Sky; Dawn is his bride, or, in another mood, the Dawns are said to be his mothers. On a car drawn by seven tawny steeds, his course is guided by other great gods, the old Adityas, Mitra, Varuna and Aryaman. Again, he is the eye of Mitra, Varuna, or Agni (Fire). He is the preserver and soul of all creation, of everything that stands or moves. Enlivened by him men pursue their vocations. He is far-seeing, man-beholding, takes note of the good and bad deeds of mortals. They in turn look up to him, rejoicing in the security and the inspiration which his light affords.

I shall let speak for itself the hymn, Rig-Veda 1.50, in the attractive metrical translation (with slight changes) of the late Dr. John Muir; see his Original Sanskrit Texts, vol. v., p. 160, and Metrical Translations from Sanskrit Writers, p. 179:

Hymn to Surya

By lustrous heralds led on high, The fire Sun ascends the sky; His glory draweth every eye.

The stars which gleamed throughout the night, Now scared, like thieves slink fast away, Quenched by the splendor of thy ray.

Thy beams to men thy presence show; Like blazing fires they seem to glow. Conspicuous, rapid, source of light, Thou makest all the welkin bright.

In sight of gods and mortal eyes, In sight of heaven thou scalest the skies.

O fiery God, with thy keen eye, Thou scannest, like God Varuna, The doings of all busy men.

Thou stridest o’er the sky’s broad space, Thy rays do measure out our days; Thine eye all living things surveys.

Seven tawny steeds thy chariot bear, Self-yoked, athwart the fields of air, Bright Surya, god with flaming hair.

That glow above the darkness we Beholding upward soar to thee, For there among the gods thy light Supreme is seen, divinely bright.

And there are other gods, not a few, whose origin in nature is positively on the surface. So the two wind-gods Vata and Vayu, the former of whom, on the likely evidence of Teutonic Wotan-Odhin, is probably prehistoric. A good bit of profound human philosophy is contained in the mere fact that Vata is described as a real person in language such as that of the following hymn,¹ and that he may finally be invited to partake of oblations:

Hymn to Vata

Now Vata’s chariot’s greatness! Breaking goes it, And thunderous is its noise. To heaven it touches, Makes light lurid, and whirls the dust upon the earth.

Then rush together all the blasts of Vata: To him they come as women to their trysing; With them conjoint, on the same chariot travelling, Hastes the god, the king of all creation.

Sleepless hastes he on his pathway through the air, Companion of the watery flood. First-born and holy,

Whence, forsooth, arose he, and whence was he created?

The breath of gods and source of life is Vata. This god doth journey whithersoe’er he listeth, His sound is heard but no one sees his figure. With our oblation let us this Vata honor!

But there is one figure that looms far above all others in ancient Hindu religious history from Veda to Mahabharata, as the classical illustration of how a phenomenon of nature may be itself and personal god at one and the same time. It is the god Agni “Fire,” who is element and god at the beginning and remains so to the end. Richard Wagner adopts in the Nibelungen tetralogy the doubtful interpretation of the Norse god Loge (Loki) as fire; Wotan calls upon this red-haired, impish god to appear when he wishes to hedge with fire his erring child Brunhilde. This is interesting, because it shows how even the modern poetic fancy may get itself to bridge over, uncritically, as behooves the poet, the great gap that is between the reality of nature and the unstable speculation of myth-makers. Native Hindu theologians in their scholastic mood find time to worry over the fact that a god like Agni can be devouring element and intelligent god at one and the same time. Even the Epic poet in the Mahabharata stops to wonder: “There is but one Agni, yet is he kindled manifold”;² and Agni himself is made to say: “Because I can multiply myself by the power of mental concentration (yoga), therefore am I present in the bodies (of men, as vital fire).”³

Agni is, next to Indra, the most prominent god of the Rig-Veda, quantitatively speaking. He is the theme of more than two hundred hymns, and owes his special prominence to the personification of the sacred fire which is present at all Vedic performances. In the hieratic (in distinction from the popular) hymns of the Rig-Veda there will be few cases in which Agni is not more or less directly connected with the sacrifice. And it is well now to take this simple article, the sacrifice fire, and let it unfold its own story step by step. How it turns in the hands of these priestly poets into a person gifted with the thinly disguised qualities of fire; into a messenger mediating between men and gods; into an archpriest typical of holy rites; and finally into a god. But to the end, as we shall show, the origin of all these ideas is never forgotten; the god remains a more or less well-assorted bundle of fire qualities and fire epithets. Therefore, too, he remains to the last an indifferent vehicle for far-reaching speculations, or the finer sort of religious feeling.

The Sanskrit word agnis, “fire,” at all event, is Indo-European; Latin ignis, Lithuanian ugnis, Old Slavic ogni. Some kind of worship of the sacrifice fire, and with it some degree of personification, is likely to have taken place in Indo-European times. The Greeks and Romans, as well as the Aryans, offered libations to the fire when using it to convey offerings to their gods. But there was no definite result that we know of; the chaste figure of Hestia of the Greeks, or Vesta of the Romans, contrasted with boisterous male Agni, shows that the initial conception must have been faint and unstable, to enable it to produce shapes so thoroughly diverse. In the main God Agni is in every essential a product of the poet-priests of the Rig-Veda.

In India, as elsewhere, fire was produced by friction, and this mode of starting fire was obligatory as far as the sacrifice fire was concerned. The two fire-sticks, or drills, called arani, are therefore Agni’s parents, the upper stick being the male, the lower the female. They produce him under the name of Ayu “Living”; wonderful to narrate, from the dry wood the god is born living. At once he becomes the type of human progeny, and faintly figures as, or suggests the first man and the originator of the human race.⁴ The new-born infant is hard to catch; he is born of a mother who cannot give him suck. The child as soon as born devours the parents.

With a different touch, because powerful exertion is required to produce Agni by friction, he is frequently called “Son of Strength.” The pronounced ritualist quality of the poetry of the Rig-Veda fixes Agni as a divinity of the morning, rather than of the night. Interpretations of Rig-Veda passages which involve reference to something like the cosy family hearth, the tea-kettle simmering, the wind soughing outside, are generally moonshine. Nor is his definite association with the morning just what we should expect it to be from our point of view; no suggestion, perchance, of the merry dairy maid milking the cows, or the housewife busy with a comfortable breakfast. Familiar, home-life touches are not absent altogether even in the Rig-Veda; they are more abundant in the “House-books” (Grhya-Sutras). But in the main Agni is cosmic and ritualistic, and little else. He dispels the darkness, destroys the demons of night. He throws open the gates of darkness; earth and sky are seen when Agni is born in the morning. He is even supposed to lift daily the eternally youthful sun to the sky to furnish light to the people.⁵

Such is his cosmic aspect in the morning. On the other hand his ritualistic character betrays itself in his epithet usharbudh, which means “waking at dawn.” We have seen before that he is also regarded as the son of Dawn.⁶ All this emphasises the opening of the sacrificial day, ushered in by the Goddess Dawn, God Agni, and the gods that wake in the morning and come in the morning, like the Agvins and others.

Every morning Agni is produced anew for the sacrifice; this secures for him the appropriate epithet “the youngest.” On the other hand he is the same old Agni, and now comes a good deal of playful or mystic handling of this paradox. His new births are contrasted with his old; having grown old he is born again as a youth. Thus it happens that he is called “ancient” and “very young” in the same passage; the Vedic poets delight in this kind of mental see-saw. The mystery is shallow; what is meant is, that the vigorous life of the present-day Agni recalls his traditional importance in the past. There is no sacrificer older than Agni, for he conducted the first sacrifice. Just as he flames up today at dawn so he shone forth under the auspices of former dawns at the sacrifice of many a great forefather: Bharata, or Vadhryacva; Divodasa, or Trasadasyu.

After having been kindled Agni is placed upon the altar or, if we trust the testimony of the ritual texts of the Veda, upon three altars.⁷ Fagots are now piled on, fat oblations are poured in; he waxes big; his tongues, three, or seven, shoot up; he has four eyes, or a thousand eyes—both things mean that he is sharp-sighted; his jaws are sharp; and his teeth shine golden, or his iron grinders clutch. Then the figure is changed: he is flame-haired, tawny-haired, tawny-bearded; his glowing head faces in all directions. Ghee, or melted butter, is his food: he is therefore called ghee-backed, ghee-faced, ghee-haired. Once, even more boldly, Agni himself says, ghee is his eye. This is the point where Agni begins to take on a little more of the flesh and blood of personality upon the skeleton of his elemental qualities. For he receives the offerings neither passively nor selfishly. At as late a time as that of the great Epic, the Mahabharata⁸ he is made to say: “The ghee that is poured into my mouth, in the way prescribed in the Veda, nourishes the Gods and the Manes . . . called by my mouth the Gods and the Manes come to eat the ghee.” In fact the gods cannot subsist without him. A very neat story which, as usual, remains one of the stock themes of story-telling India in later times, tells in two hymns of the Rig-Veda⁹ how Agni on a certain occasion tired of this service. Agni has it born in upon him that his older brothers have worn themselves out in their job, and concludes that he had better dodge a like fate. Whereupon he escapes into the waters. But the god Yama discovers and betrays him, and Varuna, as the spokesman of the gods, finally induces him for a consideration to resume the task of expediting the sacrifice to the gods.¹⁰ The names which he obtains in this capacity, such as “oblation-eater” and “oblation-carrier,”¹¹ reappear familiarly in the Mahabharata and later. There they are pigeon-holed, along with numerous other names, to be selected in the manner of the Norse kennings, to vary the diction, to swell its dignity, and to ease the task of the verse-maker. With a different turn, he brings the gods to the sacrifice, and seats them on the strewn grass. He thus becomes familiar with the roads that connect heaven and earth, and becomes the regular messenger between the two. In this capacity he is associated with the Angiras, a race of mythic semi-divine priests whose name seems to be identical with Greek ἄγγελος (angel), “messenger.” They also mediate between gods and men, and naturally Agni is an Angiras, the first seer Angiras, the ancient Angiras, the most inspired of the Angiras.

Agni officiates at the sacrifice and becomes the divine counterpart of the earthly priesthood: house-priest, serving-priest, and priest in general, as states the very first stanza of the Rig-Veda. As such he also inspires, or invents the brilliant speech and thought of prayer, and, what is very important, he frees from sin. For the sacrifice, of course, is the staple means of conciliating the gods when they are supposed to be angry. The idea of priesthood blends with that of seer and sage. He is so expert and well-travelled as to assume in a very pronounced sense the qualities of omniscience and omnipresence.¹² He knows everything by virtue of his wisdom; he embraces wisdom as a felly does the wheel. The adjective kavikratu, “possessing the intellect of the sages,” applies to him particularly, and the epithet jātavedas, “having innate wisdom,” is exclusively his own. From the function of archpriest and arch-sage to godhead it is but a step. Agni is the divine benefactor of his worshipper who sweats to carry him fuel: him he protects with a hundred iron walls, or takes across all calamities, as in a ship over the sea. And then, finally, he is divine monarch, surpassing mighty heaven and all the worlds, is superior to all the other gods who worship him, or takes his place in the long line of supreme gods whom the poets indifferently, or henotheistically, as Max Müller put it, praise at convenient times with all the fervor and all the resourceful verbiage which marks the diction of the Rig-Veda:

Then hail to Agni on his brilliant chariot, The shining signal of every holy sacrifice, Of every god in might divine the equal, The gracious guest of every pious mortal!

Dressed out in all thy ornamented garments, Thou standest on the very navel of the earth, The hearth of sacrifice. Born of the light, Both priest and king, shalt hither fetch th’ immortals!

For thou hast ever spread both earth and heaven, Tho’ being their son thou hast spread out thy parents. Come hither, youthful god, to us that long for thee, And bring, O Son of Strength, the bright immortals!

(Rig-Veda 10. 1. 5-7.)

I have followed the main current of Agni’s life in order to make clear the meaning of arrested personification, or arrested anthropomorphism. The Vedic poets are far from restricting themselves to this one view. Fire is not only in the sacral fire-sticks, but he is visible everywhere: as sun and lightning in the sky; as glint on the surface of the waters; as the embryo of plants and trees that willingly give it up when in flames; as the spark of flint and the rocks; and even in the heat of the body, and as vital force latent in all living things. Especially remarkable is the certainly Indo-European myth which deals very clearly with a twin descent from heaven: the descent of fire, and the descent of the heavenly fluid. In its Vedic treatment the heavenly fire is Agni of the lightning; the heavenly fluid is soma, the ambrosial drink: “The one (namely, the heavenly fire) Matarigvan brought from heaven; the other (namely, soma) the eagle brought from the rock.”¹³ I have spoken before of the descent of the heavenly fluid;¹⁴ the descent of Agni from heaven is doubtless connected with the lightning fire. Matarigvan, however, who brings Agni, belongs to the class of mythic persons for whom I have reserved the attribute “opaque.” Even this dramatic nature act, which the plastic spirit of the Greeks shapes for all time into the main motif of the Prometheus tragedy, appears to the Vedic poets merely as heaven’s method of furnishing fire and soma for the sacrifice: it does not turn into a real humanised myth. And what I have deduced here in detail is true of all of Agni’s traits in the Veda; he is at one moment element and phenomenon, at another person and god, at all times as clear as his own light to teach the nature of the gods.

I have used the term transparent in connection with divine personifications whose naturalistic basis and whose starting point in human consciousness is absolutely clear. Now the term translucent, figure of speech though it is, I wish to be understood in its plain physical sense. It refers to mythic formations whose structural outline may still be traced with a great deal of truth, although it is obscured by incrustations of secondary matter. It is often merely the loss of the original simple name which is the cause of the obscuration. Divinities of the name “Dawn” (Ushas), “Sun” (Surya), or “Fire” (Agni), bring credentials that every one can read. But the quick substitution of an attractive, or pointed epithet for the original name may plague the investigator for all time to come, and deprive him of mathematical certainty, even though every instinct draws him in the right direction. An unusually unsympathetic sceptic will not find it hard to rest his feet upon some projecting ledge of doubt, and all history cries out that we must not try to dislodge sceptics by violence. Every middle-aged student of Comparative Mythology and Comparative Philology recalls the time when even the most complex myths were blandly explained as nature processes; nothing in that line could be too fanciful and far-fetched to find adherents. No cock might crow in a fairy-tale without becoming party to an involved and profound sun-myth. We have all sobered much; there is now, perhaps, too much insistence upon the element of uncertainty which goes with the term “probable,” no matter how closely the probable may approach certainty.

The two Asvins, the Dioscuri, are translucent gods. They harbor some phenomenon of morning light as one part of their dual character. The other is probably the corresponding phenomenon at eve. But just what this duality is we were unable to say.¹⁵ It is something to have limited this brilliant Indo-European myth so far, and to find behind it reason rather than idle fancy. The god Varuna, as we have seen, belongs also to this class; for better or for worse interpretation will turn to some phenomenon of heaven which suggests the god’s salient quality of overseer, be it encompassing sky, be it moon. I choose two other gods as the type of translucent gods, Vishnu and Pushan; in both cases we shall be engaged with variant aspects of the sun. This may seem to some minds a suspicious monotony of explanation, in fact it is the so-called solar theory. But I am nothing daunted: the sun is important and ever present with early observers; I shall let him fight his own battles.

If I am not mistaken, I have done the cause of Vishnu a service in pointing out that the name itself is compounded of the two words vi and snu, meaning “through the back.”¹⁶ The leading fact in Vishnu’s activity in the Veda is that he takes three strides (tredha vi kram). A passage in the Sama-Veda states that “Vishnu strode through over the back of the earth.”¹⁷ Here the word for “through” is vi; the word for “back” is sanu (snu)—the two parts of the name Vishnu. The third of these enormous strides lands Vishnu in the highest heaven, in the bright realm of light, where even the winged birds do not dare to fly.¹⁸ There in the highest stepping place is Vishnu’s fount of honey.¹⁹ This place is identical with the highest place of Agni; Vishnu guards the highest, or third place of Agni, the fire on high, the sun.²⁰ There the gods and pious men rejoice. Liberal sacrificers ever look forward to this place; it is fixed like an eye in heaven.²¹ Later Veda texts clearly define the three steps as earth, atmosphere, and heaven. Vishnu represents the sun in his ascent from the horizon of the earth, through the atmosphere to the zenith, considered as the solar paradise. His swift climb over the back of the universe through the cosmic triad justly arrested the fancy of the poets, and they name him accordingly. Instead of holding to the proper name of the sun, or to his more familiar functions of giver of light and life, they express in the name Vishnu, and in the fancies connected with it the sufficiently remarkable fact that his ascent from earth to the paradisiacal zenith involves but three stations: earth, atmosphere, and heaven. From the earliest time Hindu records show the greatest interest in this threefold division of the universe.²² Other notions, such as that Vishnu marks off with his wide steps for his worshippers corresponding breadth or wide scope for success and prosperity, and that he frees them from restraint and trouble, follow as an almost inevitable consequence. In a later time Vishnu is elevated to the highest place; he is one of the so-called Hindu Trinity. To the end he remains the Vishnu of the solar paradise to whom go the spirits of the departed pious. But at the same time he represents to his sectarian worshippers the pantheistic Brahma, or “all-soul,” with which the soul of man is ultimately destined to unite.

I choose as the second example of a translucent god, the shepherd god Pushan. His chief claim to usefulness is that he knows the roadways; protects from their dangers, such as wolves and robbers; guards cattle, so that they be not dashed to pieces in the ravine; brings them home unhurt when they have gone astray; and, in general, restores lost things. Pushan personally drives the cows to pasture; he weaves the sheeps’ dresses, and smoothes their coats; he carries a goad, and his car is drawn by goats. And seeing that he lives on mush or gruel, whereas the other gods revel in soma or ghee, his bucolic nature is pretty clear. His name means “Prospero,” which may, of course, be the epithet of any benevolent god, and therefore veils rather than tells his particular character.

The following specimen shows the tone of the not too numerous hymns addressed to him:

Rig-Veda 6. 54.

Guide us, O Pushan, to a man Who, wise, straightway shall point the way, And say to us: “Lo, here it is!”

With Pushan joined let us go forth; He points our houses out to us, And saith to us: “Right here they are!”

His chariot’s wheel doth never break; Its seat doth never tumble down; Nor doth his wheel’s rim ever crack.

Whoso payeth tribute to the god Him Pushan never doth forget; That man is first to gather wealth.

May Pushan follow our kine, May he protect our horses too, And furnish us with solid wealth!

May naught be lost, nor aught be hurt; May naught be injured in the pit; Our cattle sound bring back to us!

May Pushan pass his good right hand Around about and far and wide, And drive our lost goods back to us!

The standard interpretation of this god is again as a sun-god. This is well supported by some higher

The Religion of the Veda

Transparent and Opaque Gods

place is Vishnu’s fount of honey.¹ This place is identical with the highest place of Agni; Vishnu guards the highest, or third place of Agni, the fire on high, the sun.² There the gods and pious men rejoice. Liberal sacrificers ever look forward to this place; it is fixed like an eye in heaven.³ Later Veda texts clearly define the three steps as earth, atmosphere, and heaven. Vishnu represents the sun in his ascent from the horizon of the earth, through the atmosphere to the zenith, considered as the solar paradise. His swift climb over the back of the universe through the cosmic triad justly arrested the fancy of the poets, and they name him accordingly. Instead of holding to the proper name of the sun, or to his more familiar functions of giver of light and life, they express in the name Vishnu, and in the fancies connected with it the sufficiently remarkable fact that his ascent from earth to the paradisiacal zenith involves but three stations: earth, atmosphere, and heaven. From the earliest time Hindu records show the greatest interest in this threefold division of the universe.⁴ Other notions, such as that Vishnu marks off with his wide steps for his worshippers corresponding breadth or wide scope for success and prosperity, and that he frees them from restraint and trouble, follow as an almost inevitable consequence. In a later time Vishnu is elevated to the highest place; he is one of the so-called Hindu Trinity. To the end he remains the Vishnu of the solar paradise to whom go the spirits of the departed pious. But at the same time he represents to his sectarian worshippers the pantheistic Brahma, or “all-soul,” with which the soul of man is ultimately destined to unite.

I choose as the second example of a translucent god, the shepherd god Pushan. His chief claim to usefulness is that he knows the roadways; protects from their dangers, such as wolves and robbers; guards cattle, so that they be not dashed to pieces in the ravine; brings them home unhurt when they have gone astray; and, in general, restores lost things. Pushan personally drives the cows to pasture; he weaves the sheeps’ dresses, and smoothes their coats; he carries a goad, and his car is drawn by goats. And seeing that he lives on mush or gruel, whereas the other gods revel in soma or ghee, his bucolic nature is pretty clear. His name means “Prospero,” which may, of course, be the epithet of any benevolent god, and therefore veils rather than tells his particular character.

The following specimen shows the tone of the not too numerous hymns addressed to him:

Rig-Veda 6. 54.

Guide us, O Pushan, to a man Who, wise, straightway shall point the way, And say to us: “Lo, here it is!”

With Pushan joined let us go forth; He points our houses out to us, And saith to us: “Right here they are!”

His chariot’s wheel doth never break; Its seat doth never tumble down; Nor doth his wheel’s rim ever crack.

Whoso payeth tribute to the god Him Pushan never doth forget; That man is first to gather wealth.

May Pushan follow our kine, May he protect our horses too, And furnish us with solid wealth!

May naught be lost, nor aught be hurt; May naught be injured in the pit; Our cattle sound bring back to us!

May Pushan pass his good right hand Around about and far and wide, And drive our lost goods back to us!

The standard interpretation of this god is again as a sun-god. This is well supported by some higher mythic traits in which this god is not altogether wanting. He is lord of all things that stand or move; almost the same words describe Surya (Helios). He also is the lover or husband of the Sun-Maiden Surya, that arch-flirt who carries on affairs with the male Surya, the Agvins, and Soma. He alone has the very ancient epithet aghrni “glowing.” This fits the sun, and besides hardly any other article than fire. Now fire Pushan is not. To consider him, under these circumstances, a mere “god Prospero,” or an abstract “Lord of the Paths,” is a good deal like begging the question. Contrariwise his abilities as path-finder, cattle god, and restorer of lost things point to an overseeing heavenly body, particularly if we may trust another Lithuanian folk-song (daind) which I may be permitted to quote:

Oh, at the yester even tide I lost my little lamb! Oh, who shall help me go and seek My only little lamb?

I went and asked the morning star, The morning star replied: “I have to build the dear sun’s fire At morrow’s morning tide.”

I went and asked the evening star, The evening star replied: “I have to make the dear sun’s bed At every even tide.”

I went and asked the waning moon, The waning moon replied: “I have been smitten with a sword,⁵ My sorry face I hide.”

I went and asked the lovely sun, The dear sun gave reply; “Nine days I’ll seek, and on the tenth I’ll not set in the sky.”⁶

The familiar notion that the sun oversees everything⁷ appeals in this instance to the simple reasoning power of shepherd folk. A more suitable origin for a shepherd god it is not easy to imagine. They therefore dress him out in shepherd’s clothes, feed him on shepherd’s food, and turn him into a heavenly bellwether of their flocks. But his real natural history does not seem to me to be very much disguised by the simple-minded fable. We may safely call Pushan a translucent god.

The most prominent of the gods of the Rig-Veda is Indra. About two hundred and fifty hymns are devoted to his praise, perhaps one-fourth of all the hymns of the collection. No account of Vedic religion can pass by his big personality, and yet his essence and quality are that of lower, rather than higher religious conceptions, even if we adopt no higher standard than the Rig-Veda. To the growingly finer religious thought of the later Veda Indra contributes nothing positive. Negatively, the coarse grain and the fleshliness of his character which, taken all in all, are foreign to the gods of the Vedic Pantheon, arrest very unfavorable attention. Indra is so grossly anthropomorphic, that is, he embodies so completely the human qualities of brag and bluster, gluttony, drunkenness, and lust, as to make him the peg upon which to hang scepticism. In that way he contributes negatively to the advance of Hindu thought. Of this later on.

This god has remained opaque to the eye of Vedic study. He is not wanting in superlative cosmic qualities. In fact the poets never, unless except perhaps in the case of Varuna, come nearer biting off more than they can chew, than when engaged in lauding Indra. He has no counterpart among those born or to be born. No one, celestial or terrestrial, has been born, or shall be born, like unto him. All the gods yield to him in might and strength.⁸ He supports earth and sky, or spreads out the earth.⁹ More particularly, he is the Hindu Hercules and demiurge—the doer of great deeds for the people.

He slays dragons and monsters; he is the typical slayer of the foes of the pious sacrificer. To these deeds of heroic valor he is stimulated by immense potations of intoxicating soma. In order to accomplish the slaughter of the arch-dragon Vritra he drank on one occasion three lakes of that delightful beverage, so that decidedly he had a jag on, which, it has been noted, rhymes well with dragon. Accordingly he has a tremendous body, strong jaws and lips. He is tawny-haired and bearded, carries a club in his hand, and fights on a chariot drawn by two bay steeds. In general the Vedic poets cannot be accused of coarseness; yet it seems that, in this instance, they were irresistibly attracted by the mighty deeds of this, “Lord of Strength,” as they call him. This is probably owing to the fact that he is felt to be the national hero of the Aryan invaders in their struggles against the dark-skinned aborigines, whom they must overcome in order to hold possession of the land which they invaded. And nations are never coarser than when they put their own nationality into antagonism against another nation. In a recent war, familiar to all of us, a prominent warrior on the side of the stronger nation expressed his consuming desire to make, by his own valorous deeds, the language of the weaker nation the vernacular of Hades. This is the spirit of the worship of Indra.

But it would be a mistake to suppose that Indra is a mere coarse embodiment of the jingo valor of a superior race exercised against a weak enemy fated to subjection. Indra’s character is not even translucent, that is, we can no longer define his origin with certainty, but there is no doubt that he originated somewhere in visible nature. The difficulty is to tell where. To begin with, there is no belittling the fact that Indra’s origin is prehistoric. His name occurs in the Avesta (Andra) where, as is often the case with earlier Aryan divinities, he is degraded to a demon. But his chief Vedic epithet, Vritrahan, “Slayer of Vritra,” is the same name as that of the abstract genius of Victory, Verethraghna in the Avesta, and the Armenian dragon slayer Vahagn.¹⁰ On the other hand there is no real Indra literature outside of India. If then we are forced to turn to India in order to explain Indra, we must not forget that his origin is outside of India and precedes Hindu history.

The following specimen, Rig-Veda i. 32, is done into prose, rather than into metre, in order to show clearly how Indra and his principal exploit, namely, the slaughter of the dragon Vritra and the liberation of the waters, really presents itself to the mind of the poets:

1. Let me now tell forth the heroic deeds of Indra, which he that wields the club performed of yore. He slew the dragon, broke the way for the waters; he cleft the belly of the mountains.

2. He slew the dragon who lay upon the mountain. God Tvashtar forged for him his heavenly club. Like roaring cattle, down came the waters, flowing swiftly to the sea.

3. Lusty as a bull, Indra demanded soma; from three vats drank he of the pressed drink. His missile bolt he took in hand, the generous god, and slew the first-born of the dragons.

4. When thou didst smite, O Indra, the first-born of the dragons, when thou didst make naught of the wiles of the wily, then, bringing out both sun and heaven and dawn, thou verily didst not find a foeman worthy of thy steel.

5. A drunken weakling, Vritra, did challenge the great hero, the mighty, dashing fighter. He did not withstand the impact of his weapons: with broken nose lay shattered he whose foe was Indra.

6. Over him lying so, like a broken reed, the waters go flowing at will. Those (very waters) which Vritra had encompassed with his might, at the feet of them the dragon prone lay stretched.

7. Nor thunder, nor lightning did help him; nor the hail-storm which he cast about him. When Indra and the dragon fought their battle, then even for future times the liberal god won the battle.

These stanzas carry us into the very midst of a myth whose three elements bring with them three questions: First, what are the waters? Secondly, who is Vritra that shuts them in? Thirdly, who is Indra that liberates them after a struggle that puts him so very much on his mettle? Hindu tradition, commentators and later classical Sanskrit literature, has always had an unhesitating answer: The waters are rain; Vritra is the cloud that shuts them off from the earth; Indra, therefore, is the storm or thunder god that rends the clouds with his lightning bolt and frees their waters. This interpretation, at first sight thoroughly sensible and most satisfactorily suggestive, was for a good while held to be good by most western students of the Veda and Comparative Mythology. The trouble with it turned out to be that the Veda has the real storm and rain god Parjanya,¹¹ and that the hymns addressed to him describe thunder-storms in language that is very different, and cannot be mistaken for anything else than the phenomena of the thunder-storm. The sober facts of the Indra-Vritra myth are as follows: A god armed with a bolt fights a dragon or serpent who holds the rivers in confinement within the mountains. He kills the dragon, cleaves the mountains. The rivers flow from the mountains to the sea. Thus the texts: there is nothing to show that the mountains mean clouds, and the rivers the flow of rain.

After such and other premonitory symptoms of scepticism and unrest, Professor Hillebrandt has recently advanced a new theory of Indra, Vritra, and the waters, which he expounds with great ingenuity and learning.¹² He argues that the streams of India and the neighboring Iranian countries are at their lowest level in the winter; that the confiner of their waters is the frozen winter, conceived as a winter monster by the name of Vritra, “confiner;” that Vritra holds captive the rivers on the heights of the glacier mountains; and that, consequently, Indra can be no other than the spring or summer sun who frees them from the clutches of the winter dragon: “Behold, in winter’s chain sleeps the song of the waterfall under the dungeon roof of crystal ice!” So sings a Swedish poet, Count Snoilsky. And another Swedish poet, Andreas Aabel, rings out the antistrophe: “Hear the mountains proud cascade! Just now it has broken winter’s check and prison, and now it courses free along its road!”¹³

Now it is true that the emergence of spring from winter is sometimes treated poetically as a battle. We can understand this much better in a north country like Sweden where the conflict is hard and long. Even there these phenomena seem hardly to suggest so fierce and Herculean a contest as that which is supposed to take place between Indra and the frost giant Vritra:

Released from ice are stream and brook, By spring-tide’s enchanting, enlivening look.

These words of Goethe seem to come so much nearer to what might be expected.

But over and beyond, Indra performs in his professional capacity of Hercules a large assortment of other “stunts.” He releases the cows from the stables of the avaricious who confine them and will not sacrifice them to the gods. He also performs the heavenly analogue of this deed: he breaks open the stables of darkness, presided over by another demon of the name of Vala, and releases the heavenly cows, that is, the light of dawn and the sun. It seems impossible to hold aloof this important myth from the classical myths of Heracles and three-headed Geryon, and Hercules and three-headed Cacus. Hercules carries off the cattle which belong to the monster, or, in the case of Cacus, which the monster had stolen from the hero, and had hidden away in his cave.¹⁴ Indra, moreover, kills a great variety of other demons. To the immediate conception of the Veda he is indeed a sort of Hercules, the most personal of all the gods, so personal that people begin to doubt his existence, and ask, “Who has seen him?” I have brought much sympathy to Professor Hillebrandt’s interpretation which I hope may in the end turn out to be the right one; for the present it has left me in the frame of mind indicated by the word opaque. I confess, I cannot pass over as lightly as does Hillebrandt the unanimous Hindu tradition that Vritra is the cloud. The partnership of Indra with Vayu “Wind” is paralleled suggestively by the association of Parjanya and Vata, “Wind.” Parjanya is beyond peradventure a god of the thunder-storm. It is therefore still possible that the myth of Indra, Vritra, and the waters represents a specialised poetic treatment of a myth of thunder-storm, cloud, and rain. The myth may have, so to speak, been brought down to earth: Indra, the storm god, becomes a Hercules, and kills a dragon who hoards in the mountains (formerly, the clouds), the rivers (formerly, the rain of the clouds). For a final solution of this most important theme in mythology it seems to me that we must look to the future. The confirmation of Hillebrandt’s masterly theory, if it comes at all, must come from Iran or Western Asia. Such confirmation should establish more definitely Indra’s and Vritra’s character in the Indo-Persian time from which, if not from a still earlier time, dates their beginning. If these earlier data should by any chance ever show Indra and Vritra in the mutual relation of summer and winter, then Hillebrandt’s hypothesis, and I fear not until then, would be triumphantly vindicated.

Religious Conceptions and Religious Feeling in the Veda

The religion of the Rig-Veda, as we have seen, is in its most superficial aspect a priestly religion of works designed to propitiate and to barter with personal gods. The outer form in which it presents itself is as poetry of the sacrifice. The sacrifice with its ceremonial formalities is, as I have ventured to say, the epidermis of Vedic religion. In its next layer the religion of the Veda is expressed in hymnal worship of the same personal gods who get the offerings. Whatever we may say about the origin of these gods, one by one, they are to the Hindu conception for the most part related to the visible and audible forces of nature. Nature in its larger aspect, cosmic nature, is the prime source of inspiration of the Vedic religious bard, just as it was the inspiration of his prehistoric Aryan and Indo-European ancestors. The conception of nature and the nature gods, notwithstanding many crudities, is singularly poetic. I shall show later that the religious consciousness, in so far as it concentrates itself upon their admiration and praise, marks in fact the highest point in the Vedic Rishis’ mental and spiritual possibilities. In the end it will be found to be something more than religious poetry; it is rather religion or religious sense expressing itself as poetic inspiration. Anyhow we must not believe that the ritual has swamped everything. The delight in the gods, especially the half-personalised nature forces which are treated as gods, is too unstinted and generous to allow us to doubt its genuineness. I am sure that many, if not all, of these poets addressed their beautiful hymns to the goddess Dawn, or to the sun-god Surya with the full swing of creative poets, delighting in their theme for the theme’s sake, and chiseling their poems for the poems’ sake. We may believe that these priest-poets at times, when in their best vein, asked the favor of the gods not as greedy beggars, but as joyously unconscious beneficiaries of divinities whose power to reward is incidental to their inherent generous nature, and who, therefore present themselves as a brilliant and worthy theme of song.

But the every-day existence of these men is something different. It is loaded down with those dreadful practicalities. They must live by this very trade of theirs, namely, praise of the gods and purveyance of the sacrifice. When they turn their minds away, as they constantly do and must do, from those well-conceived personifications they tend downward. As middle-men between the gods and men they must, above all, take care of men, their own selves not least of all. Men can subsist and prosper only if the gods return in kind. The gods, on the whole, are good; they do not beat down the requests of him that comes with prayer and cup of soma. Reciprocity, frank unconditional reciprocity, thus becomes an accepted motive: “Give thou to me, I give to thee,” is the formula.¹⁵ The sacrificing king, or rich householder, is thereby placed between the upper and the nether mill-stone: he must satisfy both gods and priests, each of whom show a surprising habit of becoming more and more exacting as time goes by. In this way the high poetic quality of Vedic religion is crowded and choked by many conceptions mean from the start, or bent by these circumstances into a mean shape. The gods themselves, notwithstanding their luminous origin, are brought down to the plane of human weakness. Open to adulation, they become vain; eager for advantage, they become shifty; reflecting human desires, they become sordid, and in some cases even indecent.

In the first place, Vedic poets engage in a sort of scramble for the gods. The gods cannot be in one and the same place at the same time, and cannot grant all the conflicting wishes of their numerous suppliants. I have dealt with this theme which may interest the broader students of the history of religions, in a recent paper presented to the XIVth International Congress of Orientalists, held at Algiers in 1905.¹⁶ The title of the paper, On Conflicting Prayers and Sacrifices, tells a good deal of the story. The notion which comes out quite persistently is that it requires art to “hog” the gods, and it is not a very delectable notion either from the aesthetic or the ethical point of view. Yet not less so perhaps than the Te Deum laudamus over the slaughter of enemies, which has been known to be chanted by both sides at the same time when each side claimed victory.¹⁷

So, for instance, poets of the ancient family of bards, the Vasishthas, on a certain occasion brag that they made Indra prefer their own soma libations to those of Pagadyumna Vayata, though the latter had gone to the trouble of fetching Indra from a great distance. Frantically emphatic prayer; imprecation of the man who is praying at the same time; and naughty tricks of various sorts show us under this aspect the whole world of praying and sacrificing men engaged in a sort of universal game of tag: the hindmost is “it.” The Vedic Hindus have made a sad botch of this matter. I am glad to say that this particular crudity passes out at the end of the Vedic period with the slow “twilight of the gods” which shifts the interest from polytheism, myth, and sacrifice to the theosophic speculations of the Upanishads. When the personal gods emerge again in later Hinduism, they are much clarified; at least the risky question about their presence in many places at one and the same time, and the equitable distribution of their favors is, as far as I know, never asked again.

There is scarcely any idea which has suffered so much from the utilitarian aspects of Vedic religion as the Vedic idea of faith. To begin with, the word itself is of interest; it is çraddha, the sound for sound equivalent of Latin and our own credo. The etymological meaning of this word is absolutely transparent. It means “to set one’s heart upon.” This etymology, which is still quite clear to the Vedic poets, shows it full of ethical possibilities. The word starts well in the Rig-Veda. It means first of all belief in the existence and godhead of the gods. So, a poet is anxious to make certain the position of the god Indra, that blustering, pinchbeck, braggart, Herculean god whose shortcomings have gone far to establish a certain position for the Vedic freethinker. The poets say of him:

“The terrible one of whom they ask, where is he? Nay verily they say of him, he is not at all. He makes shrink the goods of his enemy like a gambler the stakes of his opponent: Put your faith in him—He, O folks, is Indra.” (Rig-Veda 2. 12. 5.)

“As a strong warrior, he verily fights with might great battles in behalf of the people. Aye, then they have faith in strong Indra, as he hurls down his weapon.” (Rig-Veda 1. 55, 5.)

“Who, what mortal, can overcome him whose treasure thou art, O Indra? Through faith in thee, O liberal God, on the decisive day, does he that strives obtain booty.” (Rig-Veda 7. 32. 14.)

So there is no doubt that faith means the belief in the existence of the gods, and their interference in the life of man. It would be doing injustice to those early believers to say that they did not develop the idea beyond this stage of mere primary utility. A later text of the Yajur-Veda says: Faith is truth, and unfaith is lies:

“The creator (Prajapati) having beheld two qualities separated truth and lie from one another. He put unfaith into lie, faith he placed into truth.” (Vajasaneyi Samhita 19. 77.)

Next, faith is wisdom; faith is the sister of wisdom: The fool saith in his heart, “there is no god.” In order to disprove his folly it becomes needful to couple the ideas of Faith and Wisdom. From a later time we have very interesting accounts of the initiation of disciples, and their instruction in the Vedas. Teacher and pupil in a kind of dramatic dialogue carry on the solemn action: “Teach me the revealed books (of the Veda), my Lord!” saith the pupil. “I teach thee the revealed books,” replieth the teacher. “Teach me the Vedic tradition, my Lord!” saith the pupil. “I teach thee the Vedic tradition,” replieth the teacher. “Teach me Faith and Wisdom, my Lord!” saith the pupil. “I teach thee Faith and Wisdom.”¹⁸ In another text, as the pupil puts on the sacred girdle which he wears during disciplehood, he addresses it:

“Daughter of Faith, born of Zeal, sister was she of the Seers that did create the beings. Do thou, O girdle, assign to us Thought and Wisdom; also assign to us Zeal and Strength.” (Atharva-Veda 6. 133. 4.)

Faith kindles the sacrifice-fire and, by way of return, the sacred fire, this chief emblem of Brahmanical religion, is in charge of both Faith and Wisdom:

“Through Faith the fire is kindled, Through Faith the oblation is offered. Faith, that stands at the head of fortune, Her do we with our song proclaim.” (Rig-Veda 10. 151. 1.)

On the other hand, the Brahmanical disciple appeals to Agni Jatavedas (the holy fire) to preserve for him faith and wisdom, to keep intact his memory, so that he may not forget the sacred texts, and to secure him in well-being.¹⁹

Next, Faith becomes a person, a goddess. That would not be bad but for the mechanical character which she then assumes. Imagine—and in order to imagine this one must be pretty well steeped in Hinduism—the frame of mind of a poet who skilfully exalts the goddess Faith, but finally asks her to accept oblations:

“Through Faith the gods obtain their divine quality; Faith, the goddess, is the foundation of the world. May she pleased come to our sacrifice, Bring our wish as her child, and grant us immortality!

“Faith, the goddess, is the first-born of divine order, Upholder of all, foundation of the world, That Faith do we revere with our oblations; May she create for us an immortal world.” (Taittiriya Brahmana 3. 12. 3. 1, 2.)

“Faith dwells within the gods, Faith dwells upon this world, Faith, the mother of wishes— With oblations do we prosper her.” (Taittiriya Brahmana 2. 8. 8).

So far so good. All that is still a development of the idea of faith in harmony with a decent belief in personal gods. Unfortunately, the Vedic conception of faith, at least the prominent or average conception sinks to a much lower plane. In the main and in the end, faith expresses itself in works, and the Brahmans who are anything but mealy-mouthed have seen to it that they shall be benefited by these works. In other words, he who gives baksheesh (dakshina) to the Brahmans, he has faith (çraddha). In a hymn that is otherwise not badly pitched the poet requests the personified goddess Faith to make his poetic work take well with the liberal sacrificer, and to make him persona grata “with him that giveth, and him that shall give.”²⁰ An exceedingly interesting hymn of the Atharva-Veda, not at all wanting in poetic inspiration, is addressed to the demoness “Grudge,” or “Avarice.” The name of the lady is Arati. Of course she is primarily an abstraction. Yet she appears as a full-fledged person: she has a golden complexion, is lovely, rests upon golden cushions; is in fact quite an Apsaras, or “schoene Teufelinne,” as the old German poetry has it in for Venus. With all her charms she is coaxed to go away:

“Bring (wealth) to us, do not stand in our way, O Arati; do not keep from us the sacrificial fee when it is being taken to us! Homage be to the power of grudge, to the power of baffling! Adoration to Arati!

“Him whom I implore with holy word (Vac Sarasvati), the yoke-fellow of thought, may Faith enter him to-day, aroused by the burnished soma drink!” (Atharva-Veda 5. 7. 1, 5.)

That is to say, when the burnished soma drink sparkles in the cup, when the pious emotion that comes from the skilful hymn stirs the heart of the rich sacrificer, then enters into him Faith. But what kind? The kind that drives out niggardliness. Then he gives to the Brahmans. How the Brahmans do long for baksheesh, especially when they are poor!

There is the record of one who plaintively ejaculates: “What gentleman, desirous of more possessions will get us out of this wretched misery? Who desireth to sacrifice, and who is willing to give presents? Who desireth long life from the gods?”²¹

Even this mean and selfish construction of Faith, on one famous occasion at least turns forth a better side. A zealous young Brahman, Naciketas by name, observes that baksheesh is by way of being freely given. In fact his father Vajagravasa has performed a desperately pious sacrifice, the “All-his-property-sacrifice”—luscious morsel for the Brahmans. He has given away in sacrifice and attendant fees all that he possesses. Then Faith enters into the boy Naciketas. He wishes, so to say, “to get into the band-wagon.” He startles his father by asking: “To whom wilt thou give me?” The father replies: “To death”—we can imagine the formula that would come from the lips of a modern fond father, if his son were to ask him a question so very awkward. Naciketas takes him literally and goes down to Yama, the God of Death. He manages, however, to get the better of Yama, not only enjoying his hospitality, but also extracting from him certain profound information concerning the riddle of existence.²²

Now I shall not claim that this important concept was unmixedly mean and unspiritual. Indeed we have seen that it is not wholly so. This much, however, is clear that the anxious mind of the ritual is almost entirely fastened upon Faith as the promoter of the sacrifice and its attendant gifts to the Brahmans. In the end agraddha, “devoid of faith,” is the typical epithet of the demons of avarice, the Panis, who withhold the cows from the gods and the Brahmans. One or two writers have the hardihood to put up a chain of four links: Faith, Consecration, Sacrifice, Baksheesh.[^23] Since consecration (diksha) in this connection means really nothing but ancient hocus-pocus preliminary to the sacrifice, where, we may ask, is there a franker avowal of shady motives that ordinarily present themselves elsewhere with a thick coat of whitewash?

But what is there in it for the sacrificer, we may ask? It is all very well for him to silence those raucous voices of demand, and keep giving—for a while. He must in the long run get something in return, or he will balk. Our texts, explicit if nothing else, leave no doubt in our minds as to the way in which the sacrificer was rewarded, or thought he was rewarded, under this otherwise monotonously one-sided arrangement. We have seen that Faith, Çraddha, is personified. Now the sacrifice, called ishta and the baksheesh, called (by another name) purta, enter into a close compound, the ishtapurta. They, in their turn, get to have a kind of personal reality, and turn into a kind of beneficent genius, or perhaps better a kind of solid asset which becomes useful with the gods during life, and, mark you, after death as well. During life, the god helps him who sacrifices and gives baksheesh; he adds to, does not rob his property.[^24] But it is for the most part a question of future reward. In a well-known funeral hymn of the Rig-Veda the corpse is addressed most realistically:

“Do thou join the Fathers, do thou join Yama, join thy ishtapurta (that which thou hast sacrificed and given to the priests) in the highest heaven!” (Rig-Veda 10. 14. 8.)

And the following is a particularly realistic treatment of the same ideas. Again a dead man is blessed as he goes to heaven:

“Know him (the pious dead), O ye associated gods in the highest heaven, recognise his form! When he shall have arrived by the paths that lead to the gods, disclose to him his ishtapurta (that is, the merit which he has accumulated through sacrifice and liberality to the priests)!” (Taittiriya Samhita 5. 7. 7. 1.)

And so another poet, in a better vein, says in a verse that has become famous in India:

“The highest step of Vishnu (that is the solar paradise) is ever seen by the liberal giver: it is fixed like an eye in the heavens.” (Rig-Veda 1. 22. 20.)

At a later time when the Hindus in their highest mood turn the ordinary gods into supernumeraries, when metempsychosis takes the place of a journey to heaven, when they have sloughed off priests, sacrifice fire, spoon, and ghee, all that is changed. The degraded Çraddha or Faith is replaced by Bhakti, “Devotion,” that is, devotion to the Eternal True, Only Being that is at the root of all things. The ishtapurta, piled up in the savings-bank of heaven, where Yama and the Fathers are engaged in everlasting feasts, is replaced by karma, the accumulated deeds of a given lifetime and the attendant evolution which these deeds have worked upon the spirit. This so definitely shapes character as to determine the nature of the next rebirth, until a perfect life shall free the mortal from the toils of all existence, and replace him in the bosom of the One True Being. Of all this later on.

However, even these saccharine promises about the accumulated credit given in heaven for sacrifice and baksheesh seem not to have been regarded by the poet priests as a sufficient guarantee that they might securely count upon that faith which meant works useful to them. They employ another device. Being skilled verse-smiths, they begin to use their craft to forge chains of poetry which shall hold rich patrons willing captives. They compose the so-called dana-stutis, “gift-praises,” or gatha naracahsyak, “stanzas singing the praise of men.”[^25] In dithyrambic language exorbitant gifts on the part of generous givers of old, mythic kings and patrons, are narrated, so as to stimulate the potential patron of the present day. They sing these praises so stridently that the Vedic texts themselves, in their soberer moments, decry the “gift-praises” as lies and pollution. The poet of a “stanza singing the praise of men” and the brandy-drunkard are likened unto one another: they are polluted, their gifts must not be accepted. I question whether the religious literature of any other people contains anything that resembles either in character or extent the “gift-praises” of the Veda; the type is thoroughly Hindu in its naiveté and its boundlessness.

To begin with, there is in the Rig-Veda a doubtless late hymn consecrated to Dakshina, or “Baksheesh.” It is only a poetaster who undertakes, as he says, to unfold “the broad road of Baksheesh,” i.e. to show how important it is to keep giving. Then, with refreshing obviousness he claims:

“Those that give dakshina dwell on high in the heavens; they that give horses dwell with the sun. They that give gold partake of immortality; and they that give garments, O Soma, prolong their lives.” (Rig-Veda 10. 107. 2.)

There are forty or more “gift-praises” in the Rig-Veda alone; they continue throughout the rest of the Veda. I do not mean to dwell upon them beyond a single example. We may remark, however, that some of this baksheesh must have proved a veritable elephant on the hands of the receiver, except for the fact that it was as a rule imaginary baksheesh:

“Listen, ye folks, to this: (a song) in praise of a hero shall be sung! Six thousand and ninety cows did we get (when we were) with Kauruma among the Rueamas!

“Kauruma presented the Seer with a hundred jewels, ten chaplets, three hundred steeds, and ten thousand cattle.” (Atharva-Veda 20. 127. 1, 3.)

Operations on such a scale are calculated to show the magnates of the present day meat-packing trust that they have yet to learn from these arch-flatterers a trick or two in the way of collecting cattle.

If my hearers shall ask now what, after all this, is the essence of Rig-Vedic religion, I am for my part not unready to answer in accordance with hints thrown out before. It is poetry, or rather, more precisely, poetic exaltation, or the pride and joy of poetic creativeness. This is at first conceived to be favored and promoted by the gods, because they get the fruit of it in the form of praise and flattery. The finer the frenzy of the poet and the more finished the product of his art, the better pleased are the gods. Therefore the gods, next, co-operate with the poets, promoting their devotion and its expression. Finally, these twin factors of devoted fervor and its successful utterance in hymns and stanzas create sensations of satisfaction which are easily taken for sanctification. At first the article is not very genuine. But it goes on being the receptacle of better thoughts until it grows into what we may consider real religious feeling.

To some extent we can test this statement by showing what the religious feeling of the Veda is not, rather than what it is. The frank system of barter of the sacrificer’s soma and ghee for the god’s good gift and protection, with considerably more than one-eighth of one per cent. brokerage for the priest—that, surely, is not the religious feeling in the souls of the composers of the Rig-Veda hymns. I have taken pains to show how constantly present is this external side of their religion: may the religion that is free from all external considerations, the religion from which is absent every form of safe-guarding self, throw the first stone.

The contemplation of the glory of the gods as a matter of intellectual wonder is expressed times without end. It does not seem to me to have quite the true ring. It is perfunctory; it is told by rote. God after god steps into line and gets it. They each in turn establish the heavens and the earth; they start the sun on his course, almost indifferently well. Perhaps, as I have hinted before, their rotation in the ritual, rather than forgetfulness of the virtues of the preceding god, is the truth at the bottom of this kathenotheism or henotheism, as Max Müller called it. It is polytheism grown cold in service, and unnice in its distinctions, leading to an opportunist monotheism in which every god takes hold of the sceptre and none keeps it. Anyhow it is very mechanical. No one who reads in the hymns the endless accounts of the wonderful performances of the gods will deny that the poets at times grow truly warm and feel their theme. Sometimes they are really carried away by it. But I do not believe that either the greatness and majesty, or the incomprehensibleness of the gods, have produced a permanent impression of their superiority and perfection which should permit us to speak of settled intellectual religious consciousness in the Rig-Veda.

Most conspicuously there is no sentimental relation of any great depth between gods and men, and therefore no piety in the higher sense of the word. I mean piety that is not mere emotional self-excitement, but reasonable and settled reverence of tried and true gods. As a matter of fact the gods are good, and, at least in a general way, they are just also. In India, as we have seen, the gods have in charge especially the order of the world, and that is at the proper time, to the advantage of the suppliant mortal. Conversely, and especially, god Varuna stands ready to punish the wrong-doer. The poets sometimes describe Varuna’s power, and the sense of their own unworthiness or sinfulness in language that reminds us of the Psalmist. Varuna, however, is no longer pre-eminent even in the Rig-Veda: he has left no really lasting impression on India’s religions. If Varuna had prevailed India would have become monotheistic and theocratic, which it never did.

Occasionally a start is made towards a warmly glowing relation of love and confidence; the singer in need of help trusts that the god will help him. But there is no permanent, clarified, unselfish love of the gods such as overrides the experience of their instability, such as lives down the melancholy fact that they do not always help. And we have seen what faith is in the Veda: it is the faith that manifests itself in works. The Vedic poets are trained “master-singers.” Such poets are not likely to penetrate far into the soul of man. There is no real warmth or depth, no passionate indistinct feeling, no unsatisfied longing which can be made hopefully endurable, or even pleasurable and exalting, through the mystery of a relationship with perfect beings, understood by each individual soul in its own way. Anything like a contemplative, trustful joy in the perfection of the gods comes much later: it is of the Bhagavadgita, rather than the Rig-Veda.

But these master-singers do believe in their own art; in their wonderful poetry, and in the exaltation of mind which goes with its composition. The gods accept both the poetry and the devout mind at the value put upon them by the poets; the poets are serenely certain that the gods are well satisfied.[^26]

This then is the state of mind that approaches genuine and lasting religious feeling in the Rig-Veda: belief in the beauty and fitness of those glittering, rhythmical, and assonant stanzas; genuine rapture over the excited, throbbing mind, while the glow of composition is upon the poet. The poet calls himself vipra, “inspired”; calls his compositions vipah, “inspirations”; and when he composes, vepate mati, “he is inspired in his mind.” In the poet’s pride of exquisite workmanship and the gods’ unresisting admiration, the Rig-Veda makes us forget at times that unpleasant economic foundation of the performance, namely flattery and cajolery of the gods—for what there is in it.[^27] Soon both gods and men are engaged fraternally in promoting devotion and its best possible expression in hymns, as things of intrinsic worth, as beautiful elevated cosmic potencies. And so we finally find at the summit of this thought, the captivating and important prayer of the poet of the Savitri stanza,[^28] that the god himself shall inspire his devotion.

I have used the word “master-singers.” We may take this word quite stringently and seriously. The hymns often allude to the songs of old that were composed by the Rishis of the past. The very first hymn in the Rig-Veda strikes this note in its second stanza: “Agni, worthy to be adored by the ancient Rishis and the present ones—may he conduct the gods hither!” Another time a poet of the family of Kanva sings:[^29] “In the spirit of the olden times do I dress out my songs like (the poet) Kanva, through which (god) Indra gets his fiery strength.” Or again: “(Hear), O Indra, him that hath produced for thee a new and lovely song, with comprehending mind a pious song such as of yore has strengthened the divine order of the universe.”[^30] In more confident or ecstatic temper, the poets often declare that they have produced new songs of praise, and that, in their opinion, these are first-rate songs. One poet recommends his “new, beautiful song of praise, that comes from the heart;” another exclaims: “I bring forward my word, the new, the fresh-born.” With all due respect to their predecessors this pretty nearly amounts to saying that the new hymns are just as good as the old, in addition to having the charm of novelty. One thing is certain: we have nothing like beginnings before us. The Rig-Veda is pretty nearly the final expression of its own type of composition. What comes later in the way of sacred poetry is distinctly epigonal, or after-born. We are face to face with the finished product of this past age.

If we consider that the theme is the worship of unclarified polytheistic gods, but little advanced beyond the point where they originated somewhere in nature, or in a tolerably primitive consciousness, we may say, taking the fat with the lean, that the pride of these poets in their work is justified. Of course we must not apply the chaster standards of a later time, nor can we expect perfectly even results. Anyhow, in the poet’s own eyes the Rig-Vedic hymn is a thing of blameless, finished beauty. He has fashioned it as a skilled artisan a war chariot. He has filed it until it is free from all blemish, “as grain is winnowed in the winnowing-basket,” “as ghee is clarified for the sacrifice.” The heart of the poets is in their work, they are unquestionably giving the best they have. The poems are their inspirations. In so far as they rise above their all too human interests, in so far as they are something higher than blarneying beggars, they lift themselves up through their own art rather than the intrinsic qualities of the gods upon whom they spend their efforts.

In the end the gods themselves take a hand in these valuable and delectable poetic performances. Although they cannot directly furnish the metres, alliterations, beautiful words, and bold figures of speech, they can perform another service. They may furnish the devout mind, the inspiration that is behind the hymn. In fact the gods themselves perform prayers, and fashion hymns: “May the gods who perform brahma (that is, prayer) furnish us their thrice-covering protection from evil!”[^31] “Sing ye a brahma given by the gods!” exhorts a poet of the house of Kanva.[^32] Prayer, or devotion, is so beautiful as to be imagined dressed out in glowing colors and bright garments: “May God Agni lift up our devotion that hath glowing color!” or: “May God Agni place on high our brightly adorned devotion!”[^33] Heaven and Earth, stable and orderly, guide the sacrifice, aglow with shining hymns.[^34] Prayers, personified, go by the path of the divine order to the gods Indra and Agni; they are the messengers between the two worlds.[^35] Hymnal beatification of prayer can scarcely reach higher than the following:

“Prayer born of yore in heaven, Eagerly chanted in the holy assembly, Delightfully dressed out in bright array, Ours is that father-inherited prayer of old!” (Rig-Veda 3. 39. 2.)

The last step, namely that Prayer or Devotion itself becomes divine and assumes a tolerably distinct personality, deserves to hold our attention. The epithet “Goddess” is freely given to numerous designations of prayer and devotion. There is the “Goddess Devotion” (Dhī); the goddess “Lovely Praise” (Sushtuti); the goddess “Holy Thought” (Manisha), and others.[^36] And by an almost comical tour de force, such as is possible only in India, Devotion, having become divine, turns into a real personage who might in the company of the other gods call out a second layer of the same article: “Drink the soma, O ye Agvins, in the company of Agni and Indra, of Varuna and Vishnu … in the company of all pious Devotions.”[^37]

For the history of the human mind this last outcome, present in the ancient literature of this gifted people, is of unusual importance. The rather mystic idea of the divinity of Devotion and its expression, the notion that the sacred inspired thought and word can itself be god, will concern us more later on. From the point of view of religious feeling, it is the last and best word of the Hindus as to the nature of the divine. There comes to mind the first verse of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Here the original Greek for “Word” is Logos. This is not quite the same as the Hindu “Devotion,” or “Holy Utterance,” which we shall meet again in its finished expression as Brahma. The Logos originated in the philosophy of the Stoics and the Neo-Platonists: it is intellectual rather than emotional. But the two are alike in this: they seek the creative power and the creative plan in the mind or heart of the universe rather than in its mechanical manifestations. We shall see farther on how very peculiar is the treatment which the Hindus gave to this important and original concept, led on thereto by the melancholy genius that may be supposed to preside over the hot sombre land. For the present, and in this connection, we may be satisfied to see the origin of this seemingly mystic idea exposed to our eyes with a degree of clearness that is not obscured by its mythological coloring. Like almost all other important religious ideas of the Hindus this idea, when analysed patiently with the help of their rich literature, sheds light on the seeming mysteries of other religions.