CHAPTER VI.
THE RIG VEDA (CONCLUDED).—YAMA AND OTHER GODS, VEDIC PANTHEISM, ESCHATOLOGY.
In the last chapter we have traced the character of two great gods of earth, the altar-fire and the personified kind of beer which was the Vedic poets' chief drink till the end of this period. With the discovery of sur[=a], humor ex hordeo (oryzaque; Weber, V[=a]japeya, p. 19), and the difficulty of obtaining the original soma-plant (for the plant used later for soma, the asclepias acida, or sarcostemma viminale, does not grow in the Punj[=a]b region, and cannot have been the original soma), the status of soma became changed. While sur[=a] became the drink of the people, soma, despite the fact that it was not now so agreeable a liquor, became reserved, from its old associations, as the priests' (gods') drink, a sacrosanct beverage, not for the vulgar, and not esteemed by the priest, except as it kept up the rite.
It has been shown that these gods, earthly in habitation, absorbed the powers of the older and physically higher divinities. The ideas that clustered about the latter were transferred to the former. The altar-fire, Agni, is at once earth-fire, lightning, and sun. The drink soma is identified with the heavenly drink that refreshes the earth, and from its color is taken at last to be the terrestrial form of its aqueous prototype, the moon, which is not only yellow, but even goes through cloud-meshes just as soma goes through the sieve, with all the other points of comparison that priestly ingenuity can devise.
Of different sort altogether from these gods is the ancient Indo-Iranian figure that now claims attention. The older religion had at least one object of devotion very difficult to reduce to terms of a nature-religion.