“4. The wild ones who sing their song, unconquerable by force; with the Maruts come hither, O Agni!”
“5. Those who are brilliant, of awful shape, powerful, and devourers of foes; with the Maruts come hither, O Agni!”
“6. They who in heaven are enthroned as gods, in the light of the firmament; with the Maruts come hither, O Agni!”
“7. They who shoot with their darts across the sea with might; with the Maruts come hither, O Agni!”
“9. I pour out to thee for the early draught the sweet juice of Soma; with the Maruts come hither, O Agni!”
Another one says:—“O Agni, thou art the life, thou art the patron of man. In return for our prayers, bestow glory and riches on the father of a family who now addresses thee. Agni, thou art a wise protector and a father; to thee we owe life, we are of thy household.”
De Coulanges says:—“So the hearth-god was, as in Greece, a tutelary deity. Men asked of him abundance, and that the earth might be productive. He was prayed to for health, and that a man might long enjoy the light and arrive at old age like the sun at his setting. Even wisdom is demanded, and pardon for sin. For as in Greece the fire-god was essentially pure, so not only was the Brahmin forbidden to throw anything filthy into his fire, but he might not even warm his feet at it. The guilty man, also, as in Greece, might not approach his own hearth before he was purified from the stain he had contracted.”
Assuredly the Greeks did not borrow this religion from the Hindoos, nor the Hindoos from the Greeks; but Greeks, Italians, and Hindoos, belonged to one and the same race, and their ancestors at a very early period had lived together in Central Asia. There they had learnt this creed, and established their rites. When the tribes gradually moved further away from one another, they transported this religion with them, the one to the banks of the Ganges, and the others to the Mediterranean. Afterwards, some learnt to worship Brahma, others Zeus, and others again Janus; but all had preserved as a legacy the earlier religion which they had practised at the common cradle of the race.
It is remarkable that in all sacrifices, even in those offered to Zeus or to Athene, it was always to the fire that the first invocation was made. At Olympia assembled Greece offered her first sacrifice to the hearth-fire, and the second to Zeus. Similarly at Rome, the first to be adored was always Vesta, who was nothing else but the fire. And so we read in the hymns of the Veda: “Before all gods, Agni must be invoked. We will pronounce thy holy name before that of all the other immortals. O Agni, whatever be the god we honour by our sacrifice, to thee is the holocaust offered.” It was not that Jupiter and Brahma had not acquired a much greater importance in the minds of men, but it was remembered that the fire was much older than the gods.
When the populations of Greece and Italy had learnt to represent their Gods as persons, and had given each a proper name and a human shape, the old worship of the fire was similarly modified. The sacred fire was called Vesta. The common noun was made a proper name, and a legend by degrees attached to it. They even went so far as to represent the fire in statues under the features of a woman, the gender of the noun having determined the sex of the deity.