O Agni, overcome our enemies and our calamities;
Drive away all disease and the Rakshasas—
Send down abundance of waters
From the ocean of the sky.
Rigveda, x, 98. 12.
Indra similarly absorbed, and was absorbed by, the wind god Vayu or Vata, who is also referred to as the father of the Maruts and the son-in-law of the artisan god Twashtri. The name Vata has been compared to Vate, the father of the Teutonic Volund or Wieland, the tribal deity of the Watlings or Vaetlings; in old English the Milky Way was “Watling Street”. Comparisons have also been drawn with the wind god Odin—the Anglo-Saxon Woden, and ancient German Wuotan (pronounced Vuotan). “The etymological connection in this view”, writes a critic, “is not free from difficulty.”[77] Professor Macdonell favours the derivation from “va” = “to blow”.
The Indian Vata is invoked, as Vayu, in a beautiful passage in one of the hymns which refers to his “two red horses yoked to the chariot”: he had also, like the Maruts, a team of deer. The poet calls to the wind:
Awake Purandhu (Morning) as a lover awakes a sleeping maid.... Reveal heaven and earth....
Brighten the dawn, yea, for glory, brighten the dawn....
These lines recall Keats at his best:
There is no light
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown....
Ode to the Nightingale.
A stirring hymn to the wind god loses much of its vigour and beauty in translation:
Sublime and shining is the car of Vata;
It sweeps resounding, thundering and crashing;
Athwart the sky it wakens ruddy flashes,
Or o'er the earth it sets the dust-clouds whirling.