His Destiny.
Thus, the Indo-European religion knew a supreme God, and this God was the God of the heavens. He has organized the world and rules it, because, as he is the heaven, all is in him, and all passes within him, according to his law; he is omniscient and moral, because, being luminous, he sees all things and all hearts.
This God was named by the various names of the sky—Dyaus, Varana, Svar, which, according to the requirements of the thought, described either the object or the person, the heavens or the God. Later on, each language made a choice, and fixed the proper name of the God on one of these words; by which its ancient value as a common noun was lost or rendered doubtful: thus, in Greek Dyaus became the name of the heaven-god (Zeus) and Varana (Οὐρανός) was the name of the heavens, as a thing; in Sanscrit Dyaus or Svar was the material heavens; the heaven-god was Varana (later changed into Varuna); the Slavs fixed on the word Svar, by means of a derivative, Svarogu, the idea of the celestial god; the Romans made the same choice as the Greeks with their Jup-piter, and set aside the other names of the heavens; lastly, Persia described the god by one of his abstract epithets, the Lord, Ahura, and obliterated the external traces of his former naturalistic character.
This god, who reigned at the time of the breaking up of the religion of Aryan unity, was carried away, with the various religions which sprang up from it, to the various regions where chance brought the Aryan migrations. Of the five religions over which he ruled, three remained faithful to him to the last, and only forsook him at the moment when they themselves perished;—they are those of the Greeks, of the Romans, and of the Slavs, with whom Zeus, Juppiter, and Svarogu preserved the titles and attributes of the Supreme god of the Aryans, as long as the national religion lasted. They succumbed to Christ; “Heaven-father” gave way to the “Father who is in Heaven.”
India, on the contrary, very soon forgot that god for whose origin and formation, however, she accounts much better than any other Aryan religion does; and it was not a foreign god who dethroned him—a god from without—but a native god, a god of his own family, Indra, the hero of the tempest.
In fact, the supreme god of the Aryans was not a god of unity; the Asura, the Lord, was not the Lord in the same sense as Adonai. There were by the side of him, within himself, a number of gods, acting of their own accord, and often of independent origin. The wind, the rain, the thunder; the fire under its three forms—the sun in the heavens, the lightning in the cloud, the terrestrial fire on the altar; the prayer under its two forms—the human prayer, which ascends from the altar to heaven, and the heavenly prayer, which resounds in the din of the storm, on the lips of a divine priest, and descends from the heights with the torrents of libations poured from the cup of heaven, all the forces of nature, both concrete and abstract, appealing at once to the eye and to the imagination of man, were instantly deified. If the god of the heavens, greater in time and space, always present and everywhere present, easily rose to the supreme rank, carried there by his double Infinity, yet others, with a less continuous, but more dramatic action, revealing themselves by sudden, unexpected events, maintained their ancient independence, and religious development might lead to their usurping the power of the king of the heavens. Already during the middle of the Vedic period, Indra, the noisy god of the storm, ascends the summit of the Pantheon, and eclipses his majestic rival by the din of his resounding splendour.
He is the favourite hero of the Vedic Rishis; they do not tire of telling how he strikes with his bolt the serpent of the cloud, which enfolds the light and the waters; how he shatters the cavern of Cambara, how he delivers the captive Auroras and cows, who will shed torrents of light and milk on the earth. It is he who makes the sun come out again; it is he who makes the world, annihilated during the night, reappear; it is he who recreates it, he who creates it. In a whole series of hymns he ascends to the side of Varuna, and shares the empire with him; at last he mounts above him, and becomes the Universal King:—
“He, who, as soon as he was born, a god of thought, has surpassed the gods by the power of his intellect, he whose trembling made the two worlds quake by the power of his strength—O man, it is Indra!
“He, who has firmly established the tottering earth and arrested the quivering mountains; he who has fixed the extent of the wide-stretching atmosphere, and who has propped up the sky,—O man, it is Indra!
“He, who, after slaying the serpent, unpenned the seven rivers; who brought forth the cows from their hiding-place in the cavern; he, who, by the clashing of the two stones, has engendered Agni,—O man, it is Indra!
“He, who made all these great things; he, who struck down the demon race, driving it to concealment; he, who, like a fortunate gamester who wins at play, carries off the wealth of the impious,—O man, it is Indra!
“He, who gives life to both rich and poor, and to the priest his singer who implores him; the god with beautiful lips; the protecting god who brings the stones together to press out the soma,—O man, it is Indra!
“He, who has in his hands the herds of horses and cows, the cities and the chariots of war; he, who has created the Sun and the dawn; he, who rules the waters,—O man, it is Indra!
“He, who is invoked by the two contending armies, by the enemies facing each other, either triumphant or beaten; he, whom, when they meet in the struggle on the same chariot, during the onslaught, they invoke against each other,—O man, it is Indra!
“He, who discovered Çambara in the mountains where he had been hidden forty years; he, who killed the serpent in his full strength, who struck him dead on the body of Dânu,[55]—O man, it is Indra!
“Heaven and earth bow down before him; when he shakes, the mountains tremble; the drinker of soma, look at him! bearing the bolt in his arm, the bolt in his hand,—O man, it is Indra!”
But the usurper does not enjoy his triumph long; in the heat of his victory he is already stung to the heart, mortally wounded by a new and mystic power which is growing at his side, the power of prayer, of sacrifice, of worship, of Brahma, whose reign begins to dawn towards the end of the Vedic period, and which is still in existence.
What Indra did in India during an historical period, Perkun and Odin did in a pre-historical period, the one among the Lithuanians, the other among the Germans. Perkun and Odin are the Indras of these two nations, and have each dethroned the god of the heavens. Perkun was the god of the thunder with the Lithuanian pagans, and one can recognize in him a twin brother of the Hindoo Parjanya, one of the forms of the god of the storm in Vedic mythology. This king of the Lithuanian Pantheon is a king of recent date; what proves it is that the Slavs, so closely related to the Lithuanians in their beliefs, as well as in their language, and who also knew the god Perkun, have still as their Supreme god the Supreme god of the ancient Aryan religion, the god of the heavens, Svarogu.
The same revolution took place in Germany, but in a more remote period. The god of the heavens has vanished; he is replaced by the god of the stormy atmosphere, Odin, or Wuotan, the Vâta of India, the warrior god who is heard in the din of the tempest, leading his dishevelled bands of warriors, or letting loose on a celestial quarry the howling packs of the wild chase.
Thus did the Greeks, the Romans, and the Slavs allow their god to be vanquished by a foreign god; the Germans, the Lithuanians, and the Hindoos themselves forsook him for an inferior creation. Only in one single nation he finds worshippers faithful to the last. They are not numerous, but they have not allowed their belief to be encroached upon either by time or by man. We mean the few thousands of Ghebers or Parsis, who, during the great political and religious shipwreck of Persia, fleeing before the victorious sword of the Prophet, kept from Islam the treasure of their old belief, and who to this day, in the year 1879 of the Christian era, in the fire temples in Bombay, offer up sacrifices to the very same god who was sung by the unknown ancestors of the Aryan race at a time which eludes the grasp of history.
James Darmesteter.