The story in the Brahmana begins by saying that throughout. See the Oxford translation. Prajapati (the producer of things, whose acquaintance we have made in the chapter on cosmogonic myths) was half mortal and half immortal. After creating things endowed with life, he created Death, the devourer. With that part of him which was mortal he was afraid of Death, and the gods were also "afraid of this ender, Death". The gods in this tradition are regarded as mortals. Compare the Black Yajur Veda:* "The gods were formerly just like men. They desired to overcome want, misery, death, and to go to the divine assembly. They saw, took and sacrificed with this Chaturvimsatiratra, and in consequence overcame want, misery and death, and reached the divine assembly." In the same Veda we are told that the gods and Asuras contended together; the gods were less numerous, but, as politicians make men peers, they added to their number by placing some bricks in the proper position to receive the sacrificial fire. They then used incantations: "Thou art a multiplier"; and so the bricks became animated, and joined the party of the gods, and made numbers more equal.**
* Taittirya Sanhita; Muir, v. 15, note 22.
** According to a later legend, or a legend which we have
received in a later form, the gods derived immortality from
drinking of the churned ocean of milk. They churned it with
Mount Mandara for a staff and the serpent Hasuki for a cord.
The Ramayana and Mahabharata ascribe this churning to the
desire of the gods to become immortal. According to the
Mahabharata, a Daitya named Rahu insinuated himself among
the gods, and drank some of the draught of immortality.
Vishnu beheaded him before the draught reached lower than
his throat; his head was thus immortal, and is now a
constellation. He pursues the sun and moon, who had spied
him among the gods, and causes their eclipses by his
ferocity. All this is on a level with Australian mythology.
To return to the gods in the Satapatha Brahmana and their dread of death. They overcame him by certain sacrifices suggested by Prajapati. Death resented this, and complained that men would now become immortal and his occupation would be gone. To console him the gods promised that no man in future should become immortal with his body, but only through knowledge after parting with his body. This legend, at least in its present form, is necessarily later than the establishment of minute sacrificial rules. It is only quoted here as an example of the opinion that the gods were once mortal and "just like men". It may be urged, and probably with truth, that this belief is the figment of religious decadence. As to the victory of the gods over the Asuras, that is ascribed by the Satapatha Brahmana* to the fact that, at a time when neither gods nor Asuras were scrupulously veracious, the gods invented the idea of speaking the truth. The Asuras stuck to lying. The first results not unnaturally were that the gods became weak and poor, the Asuras mighty and rich. The gods at last overcame the Asuras, not by veracity, but by the success of a magical sacrifice. Earlier dynasties of gods, to which the generation of Indra succeeded, are not unfrequently mentioned in the Rig- Veda.**
* Muir, iv. 6a.
** Ibid., v. 16.
On the whole, the accounts of the gods and of their nature present in Aryan mythology the inconsistent anthropomorphism, and the mixture of incongruous and often magical and childish ideas, which mark all other mythological systems. This will become still more manifest when we examine the legends of the various gods separately, as they have been disentangled by Dr. Muir and M. Bergaigne from the Vedas, and from the later documents which contain traditions of different dates.
The Vedas contain no such orderly statements of the divine genealogies as we find in Hesoid and Homer. All is confusion, all is contradiction.* In many passages heaven and earth, Dyaus and Prithivi, are spoken of as parents of the other gods. Dyaus is commonly identified, as is well known, with Zeus by the philologists, but his legend has none of the fulness and richness which makes that of Zeus so remarkable. Before the story of Dyaus could become that of Zeus, the old Aryan sky or heaven god had to attract into his cycle that vast collection of miscellaneous adventures from a thousand sources which fill the legend of the chief Hellenic deity. In the Veda, Dyaus appears now, as with Prithivi,** the parent of all, both men and gods, now as a created thing or being fashioned by Indra or by Tvashtri.*** He is "essentially beneficent, but has no marked individuality, and can only have become the Greek Zeus by inheriting attributes from other deities ".****
Another very early divine person is Aditi, the mother of the great and popular gods called Adityas. "Nothing is less certain than the derivation of the name of Aditi," says M. Paul Regnaud.(v)
* Certain myths of the beginnings of things will be found in
the chapter on cosmogonic traditions.
** Muir, v. 21-24.
*** Ibid., v. 30.
**** Bergaigne, iii. 112.
(v) Revue de l'Histoire des Religions, xii. 1, 40.
M. Regnaud finds the root of Aditi in ad, to shine. Mr. Max Müller looks for the origin of the word in a, privative, and da, to bind; thus Aditi will mean "the boundless," the "infinite," a theory rejected by M. Regnaud. The expansion of this idea, with all its important consequences, is worked out by Mr. Max Müller in his Hibbert Lectures. "The dawn came and went, but there remained always behind the dawn that heaving sea of light or fire from which she springs. Was not this the invisible infinite? And what better name could be given than that which the Vedic poets gave to it, Aditi, the boundless, the yonder, the beyond all and everything." This very abstract idea "may have been one of the earliest intuitions and creations of the Hindu mind" (p. 229). M. Darmesteter and Mr. Whitney, on the other hand, explain Aditi just as Welcker and Mr. Max Müller explain Cronion. There was no such thing as a goddess named Aditi till men asked themselves the meaning of the title of their own gods, "the Adityas". That name might be interpreted "children of Aditi," and so a goddess called Aditi was invented to fit the name, thus philologically extracted from Adityas.*
M. Bergaigne** finds that Aditi means "free," "untrammelled," and is used both as an adjective and as a name.