* Rig-Veda, ii. 28; Hibbert Lectures, p. 284.
"Take from me my sin like a fetter, and we shall increase, O Varuna, the spring of thy law. Let not the thread be cut while I weave my song! Let not the form of the workman break before the time.... Like as a rope from a calf, remove from me my sin, for away from thee I am not master even of the twinkling of an eye.... Move far away from me all self-committed guilt, and may I not, O king, suffer for what others have committed. Many dawns have not yet dawned; grant me to live in them, O Varuna." What follows is not on the same level of thought, and the next verse contains an appeal to Varuna to save his worshipper from the effect of magic spells. "Whether it be my companion or a friend who, while I was asleep and trembling, uttered fearful spells against me, whether it be a thief or a wolf who wishes to hurt me, protect us against them, O Varuna."* Agni, again, the god of fire, seems to have no original connection with righteousness. Yet even Agni** is prayed to forgive whatever sin the worshipper may have committed through folly, and to make him guiltless towards Aditi.*** The goddess Aditi once more, whether her name (rendered the "boundless") be or be not "one of the oldest names of the dawn,"**** is repeatedly called on by her worshippers to "make them sinless". In the same way sun, dawn, heaven, soma, and earth are implored to pardon sin.
* An opposite view is expressed in Weber's Hist, of Sansk.
Literature.
** Rig- Veda, iv. 12, 4; viii. 93, 7.
*** For divergent opinions about Aditi, compare Revue de
l'Histoire des Religions, xii. 1, pp. 40-42; Muir, v. 218.
**** Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 228.
Though the subject might be dwelt on at very great length, it is perhaps already apparent that the gods of the Vedic poetry are not only potent over regions of the natural world, but are also conceived of, at times, as being powers with ethical tendencies and punishers of mortal guilt. It would be difficult to overstate the ethical nobility of certain Vedic hymns, which even now affect us with a sense of the "hunger and thirst after righteousness" so passionately felt by the Hebrew psalmists. How this emotion, which seems naturally directed to a single god, came to be distributed among a score, it is hard to conjecture. But all this aspect of the Vedic deities is essentially the province of the science of religion rather than of mythology. Man's consciousness of sin, his sense of being imperfect in the sight of "larger other eyes than ours," is a topic of the deepest interest, but it comes but by accident into the realm of mythological science. That science asks, not with what feelings of awe and gratitude the worshipper approaches his gods, but what myths, what stories, are told to or told by the worshipper concerning the origin, personal characteristics and personal adventures of his deities. As a rule, these stories are a mere chronique scandaleuse, full of the most absurd and offensive anecdotes, and of the crudest fictions. The deities of the Vedic poems, so imposing when regarded as vast natural forces, or as the spiritual beings that master vast natural forces, so sympathetic when looked on as merciful gods conscious of, yet lenient towards, the sins of perishing mortals, have also their mythological aspect and their chronique scandaleuse.*
* Here we must remind the reader that the Vedas do not offer
us all these tales, nor the worst of them. As M. Barth says,
"Le sentiment religieux a ecarte la plupart de ces mythes
ainsi que beaucoup d'autres qui le choquaient, mais il ne
les a pas ecartes tous" (Religions de l'Inde, p. 14).
It is, of course, in their anthropomorphic aspect that the Vedic deities share or exceed the infirmities of mortals. The gods are not by any means always regarded as practically equal in supremacy. There were great and small, young and old gods,* though this statement, with the habitual inconsistency of a religion without creeds and articles, is elsewhere controverted. "None of you, O gods, is small or young; you are all great."** As to the immortality and the origin of the gods, opinions are equally divided among the Vedic poets and in the traditions collected in the Brahmanas. Several myths of the origin of the gods have already been discussed in the chapter on "Aryan Myths of the Creation of the World and of Man". It was there demonstrated that many of the Aryan myths were on a level with those current among contemporary savages all over the world, and it was inferred that they originally sprang from the same source, the savage imagination.
In this place, while examining the wilder divine myths, we need only repeat that, in one legend, heaven and earth, conceived of as two sentient living beings of human parts and passions, produced the Aryan gods, as they did the gods of the New Zealanders and of other races. Again, the gods were represented in the children of Aditi, and this might be taken either in a high and refined sense, as if Aditi were the infinite region from which the solar deities rise,*** or we may hold that Aditi is the eternal which sustains and is sustained by the gods,**** or the Indian imagination could sink to the vulgar and half-magical conception of Aditi as a female, who, being desirous of sons, cooked a Brahmandana oblation for the gods, the Sadhyas.(v)
* Rig-Veda, i. 27,13.
** Ibid., viii. 30; Muir, v. 12.
*** Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 230.
**** Roth, in Muir, iv. 56.
(v) Taittirya Brahmana, i. 1, 9, 1; Muir, v. 55, 1, 27.
Various other gods and supernatural beings are credited with having created or generated the gods. Indra's father and mother are constantly spoken of, and both he and other gods are often said to have been originally mortal, and to have reached the heavens by dint of that "austere fervour," that magical asceticism, which could do much more than move mountains. The gods are thus by no means always credited in Aryan mythology with inherent immortality. Like most of the other deities whose history we have been studying, they had struggles for pre-eminence with powers of a titanic character, the Asuras. "Asura, 'living,' was originally an epithet of certain powers of Nature, particularly of the sky," says Mr. Max Müller.** As the gods also are recognised as powers of Nature, particularly of the sky, there does not seem to be much original difference between Devas and Asuras.*** The opposition between them may be "secondary," as Mr. Max Müller says, but in any case it too strongly resembles the other wars in heaven of other mythologies to be quite omitted. Unluckily, the most consecutive account of the strife is to be found, not in the hymns of the Vedas, but in the collected body of mythical and other traditions called the Brahmanas.****
** Hibbert Lectures, p. 318.
*** In the Atharva Veda it is said that a female Asura
once drew Indra from among the gods (Muir, v. 82). Thus gods
and Asuras are capable of amorous relations.
**** Satapatha Br.