| Great Agni, though thine essence be but one, Thy forms are three; as fire thou blazest here, As lightning flashest in the atmosphere, In heaven thou flamest as the golden sun. It was in heaven thou hadst thy primal birth, But thence of yore a holy sage benign, Conveyed thee down on human hearths to shine, And thou abid'st a denizen of earth. Sprung from the mystic pair by priestly hands, In wedlock joined, forth flashes Agni bright; But—O ye heaven and earth I tell you right— The unnatural child devours the parent brands. |
TO VARUNA
| The mighty lord on high our deeds, as if at hand, espies; The gods know all men do, though men would fain their acts disguise. Whoever stands, whoever moves, or steals from place to place, Or hides him in his secret cell,—the gods his movements trace. Wherever two together plot, and deem they are alone King Varuna is there, a third, and all their schemes are known. This earth is his, to him belong those vast and boundless skies; Both seas within him rest, and yet in that small pool he lies. Whoever far beyond the sky should think his way to wing, He could not there elude the grasp of Varuna the king. His spies, descending from the skies, glide all this world around, Their thousand eyes all-scanning sweep to earth's remotest bound. Whate'er exists in heaven and earth, whate'er beyond the skies, Before the eyes of Varuna, the king, unfolded lies. The ceaseless winkings all he counts of every mortal's eyes, He wields this universal frame as gamester throws his dice. Those knotted nooses which thou fling'st, O God, the bad to snare, All liars let them overtake, but all the truthful spare. |
Varuna, the all-embracing sky, is also in many hymns a solar deity. There are also other solar deities; Mitra who is frequently invoked along with Varuna; Surya, Savitri, Vishnu, and Pushan, are all gods of this class. Each of these has some attributes or some story of his own. Surya keeps his eye on men and reports their failings to Varuna and Mitra. Savitri, the quickener, raises all things from sleep in the morning with his long arms of gold, and covers them with sleep in the evening. Vishnu, the active, traverses the universe with three strides. Pushan is a shepherd who loses none of his flock; a guide also, both in the journeys of this world and in the last journey. A number of the principal gods have the common title of Adityas or children of Aditi, immensity, a being too vast and undetermined to be clearly represented. We should also mention Ushas, the dawn, a goddess whom the sun-god is daily chasing; the Asvins or two heavenly charioteers, who daily make the circuit of the heavens; Tvashtri, the smith who made the thunderbolt of Indra; the Ribhus, artificers who were once men and have been admitted to the society of the gods. Yama is the god of the dead, he first traversed the road to the country beyond, and now he rules over it, and comforts with substantial joys the spirits guided there by Agni (this points to cremation which was frequent but not universal) or by Pushan. There the Pitris or fathers sit at the same tables with the gods, and are eternally happy. Brahmanaspati, lord of prayer, is a god of another type, a personification of the act of ritual, and his presence in the Vedas, beside the elemental deities, shows how early speculation had begun.
To what Stage does this Religion belong?—Our sketch of this system is necessarily brief; we have now to inquire as to the place it occupies in the religious growth of India. It is held, on the one hand, that it is a primitive religious product, that it shows us some of the very first efforts men made to have a religion; while on the other hand it is held that the Vedic hymns and the Vedic system are sacerdotal, and are due to an advanced organisation of worship and to a special set of men who were much in advance of their age.
1. It is Primitive.—Mr. Max Müller1 says that "the sacred books of India offer the same advantages ... for the study of the origin and growth of religion ... which Sanscrit has offered for the study of the origin and growth of human speech." Dr. Muir2 claims that the Vedic hymns illustrate the natural workings of the human mind in the period of its infancy. In the Vedas, these writers consider, we are able to watch the process by which the earliest men rose to the belief in gods, and the naïve and simple methods by which man's first intercourse with gods was carried on. The undoubted antiquity of these pieces favours this view; the Rigveda is admitted on all hands to be the earliest part of Indian literature, and many of the hymns were written about 1500 B.C.3 The pure and simple nature of the Vedic religion may also appear to favour this view. It is a religion singularly free from the lower elements of man's early faith. Savage legends and especially immoral stories of the gods are markedly absent from the hymns; they are also free from the element of magic and fetishism; the gods are great beings, and religion consists in intercourse with these great beings. Now the later religious literature of India, the brahmanas or commentaries on the Rigveda and the other later Vedas, contain a variety of legends and a religion by no means free from magic. It may be maintained therefore that the pure religion of the Aryans afterwards became contaminated by contact with the lower religion of the tribes the Aryans had conquered. It was from the Dravidian and Kolarian aborigines, we are told, that Indian religion took its later corruptions. The Vedic religion has no idols, it has no dark descriptions of hell, the caste system on which later Brahmanism was based is absent from it, it has no demons to be guarded against, and no bad deities. The doctrine of metempsychosis is not found here, except perhaps in germ. The immolation of the widow on the funeral pile of her husband is not sanctioned by the Vedas, and of ancestor-worship only a few traces are found. All these, it may be held, are later corruptions. The Vedic religion is a bright and happy system, and the primitive beliefs of mankind, less changed by the Indians than they were elsewhere, are here to be seen; the hymns show the kind of faith to which a strong and happy race of men naturally came, as their minds began to open to the wonders of the world they lived in, the faith of "primitive shepherds praising their gods as they lead their flocks to the pasture." The Indians had preserved, longer than other peoples, the gift of recognising deity in nature; and the primitive beliefs of mankind survive here in something like their first integrity, while elsewhere they were broken up and confused.
1 Origin of Religion, p. 135.
2 Sanscrit Texts, vol. v. p. 4.
3 According to Mr. Max Müller the Mantra or hymn period is to be placed 1000-800 B.C.; but other scholars place it earlier.
2. It is Advanced.—On the other hand, it is urged that the society in which the hymns arose was not a primitive one, but one considerably advanced both in arts and institutions. The Rishis (seers), who composed them, belonged to families who cultivated such an art; and the hymns were no artless outpourings of childlike emotion, but were written on an elaborate metrical system for a definite purpose, namely, to form part of great acts of worship. As for the absence from them of savage myths and of immoral stories of the gods, this fact does not prove that such things were not known to the people at the time, but only that the poets did not put them in their hymns. Mr. Lang has collected the savage myths, similar to those of other peoples in various parts of the world, which are found in Indian literature of a later date, and has also shown that the hymns themselves were not quite ignorant of some of them. The Indians knew the myth of the marriage of heaven and earth, with the consequent birth of the gods. They had the story of the deluge. They had the still more primitive story of the raising up of the earth from the bottom of the sea. They had various myths of old conflicts of the gods, and of the production of the earth and all the men in it from the dissection of an immense prototypal human monster. Men were of different castes, they held, because they came from different portions of Purusha's body when it was cut up. Many stories are to be found in Indian literature which when found elsewhere are judged to be products of savage imagination, and the fact that the Rigveda ignores some of them and refines others, simply shows that the authors of that collection were on a higher level than their people in point of cultivation and of piety, as the psalmists and the prophets of Israel were in advance of theirs. We are led, accordingly, towards the conclusion that during the period when the hymns were written those who took charge of the development of worship in India were seeking to draw away attention from the more superstitious and childish elements of religion, and to bring to the front the pure and lofty intercourse man could have with the good gods. Bad gods are not cultivated; if there are foolish stories about the gods, they are not repeated, everything dark and terrible, as well as everything irrational, is removed from the working religion. Ancestor-worship is not encouraged; family rites continued, but the worship was wider than the family, and was not restricted to particular places. The ideas connected with sacrifice are not indeed very lofty. Sacrifice is, in the first place, barter. Gifts are provided for the gods, that they may give in their turn. In the second place it is a social function in which the god and the worshipper both take part. The food, and especially the soma, strengthens the god, and man and god are thereby drawn into close sympathy. But in the third place sacrifice was a piece of magic. The mere accurate performance of the rite had a mystic efficacy. It was believed to help to uphold the order of the world; without it the gods would grow weak, the ordinances of nature would fail, and man would relapse to the state of savagery. The gods themselves first sacrificed; from sacrifice they themselves were born, so that sacrifice is an essential principle of the universe, was so in the beginning, and must always be so. The Vedic leaders of religion, therefore, were not merely champions of enlightenment in religion; they were also ritualists, the rite was to them an end in itself; the proper performance of sacrifice was their principal object. This side of their work had, as we shall see, grave consequences. But the Rigveda did a great work for India in cultivating gods who were moral, and to whom man was drawn by higher than selfish motives. Gods who are just and who watch man's conduct, and do not fail to reward him according to his deeds, must quicken the conscience of those who believe in them, and gods who are able to help the weak and to forgive the penitent must make their people also merciful. In all the aberrations of Indian religion the high moral standard set by the Vedic gods is never lost sight of.