Thou hast befriended us before,
Bring hither always all the gods,
And sit thou on this sacred turf[[56]].
But whether these so-called sacrifices were in the beginning as complicated as they certainly were in the end, they are perfectly intelligible, and probably will become much more so when we know more of the literature in which they are described. How much of their development is presupposed in the Vedic hymns, I tried to explain, however shortly, as long ago as 1859 in my ‘History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature,’ p. 468, and much has been added by others during the last forty years; but when we speak of Vedic sacrifices, we must not think of the temple at Jerusalem, or of St. Peter’s, but of a small plot of grass, on which a fire was kindled within the walls of piled up turf, and kept alive by pouring butter or fat upon it.
What is far more instructive in these hymns is the general attitude of the poet towards the sights of nature which attracted his attention, and the transition from a mere description of nature such as he saw it, to its being peopled with persons whom we call either divine or mythological. Here it is where the Veda has proved so useful, and has given quite a new character to the study of ancient religion and ancient mythology in every part of the world.
How much ingenuity was spent in former days to discover the origin of Zeus and the Greek dwellers on Olympus! After opening the Veda all becomes clear. What doubt can there remain that Zeus was Dyaus, originally the sky, but not the sky as the blue vault of heaven, but the sky as active, as personified and divine? We cannot expect to find many such cases as that of Dyaus = Zeus, where an Aryan god has preserved not only his old character in India and Greece and Italy, but his name, and that almost unchanged. We saw how the name of Agni was altogether lost in Greece, though preserved as an appellative in Italy. Yet the Greeks also had their god of fire, and their gods of light, such as Hephaestos, Apollon, Dionysos, Hermes and others, each developed in his own way. And here we come across some curious reminiscences among the Aryan nations. We saw how Agni, as morning sun, was called the son of heaven and earth. In other hymns he is actually called Dvimâtâ, having two mothers. This strange name meets us again in Greek Dimêtôr, in Latin as Bimatris. The child of two mothers or parents, a name quite intelligible, as we saw, in Sanskrit, as the son of heaven and earth, had become unintelligible in Greek and Latin, so that every kind of myth was invented to account for so strange a name. To say that the deity called Dvimâtâ in the Veda was the same as the Greek Dimêtôr or the Latin Bimatris would be going too far; but to say that Dimêtôr, i.e. Dionysos (*Dyu-nisya) was originally a god of light, as much as Agni, as much as Apollon, and Hermes, the son of heaven and earth, is perfectly right and helps us to account for a number of myths in classical mythology.
These more hidden influences of ancient Aryan mythology on that of Greeks and Romans, are often the most interesting. We have a similar case in Jupiter Stator, which is generally explained as the stopper, stopping the soldiers from running away. That may be the Roman explanation, but in the Veda we have the same word Sthâtâ, applied to Indra, first as Sthâtâ harînâm, i.e. holder of horses, when he comes in his chariot; then as Sthâtâ rathasya, holder or governor of his chariot. When this origin was once forgotten, it would be not unlikely that a new meaning was discovered in Stator, viz. the preserver of law and order, or the keeper in battle.
If Agni, as in hymn X, 1, is identified with Vishnu, i. e. the sun in the zenith, we see how pliant the ideas of gods still were in the Veda. This Vishnu in India became in time as independent a deity as Apollon and Dionysos ever were in Greece, but they were all conceived as in the beginning sons of heaven and earth, and as closely allied with the sun in its various manifestations. The Vedic poet saw no difficulty in recognising the same elementary power in the sun rising in the morning, culminating at noon, and vanishing at night, nay in the fire on the hearth, and in the fire of the sacrifice, as the divine guest, the friend of the family, the priest on the altar. All this is not the Solar Theory, it is the Solar Fact, and not easily to be disposed of by an ignorant smile. Though Sanskrit scholars differ as much as other scholars, the broad facts of the Solar Theory have never been called in question by any competent authority, I mean, by anybody acquainted with Greek and Latin, and a little of Vedic Sanskrit.
While Agni here appears before us as the god of light in general, and often begins the procession of the daily gods as the light of the morning, as chasing away the dark night, as holding aloft the radiant sun, as leading forth the daughter of Dyaus (Διὸς θυγάτηρ), that is the Dawn, he being represented sometimes as the brother of the Dawn, sometimes as her lover[[57]], once even as kissing her[[58]], there are other deities, equally representative of light, but more specialised in their functions. Sûrya himself, the Greek Helios, appears among the Vedic deities, and Ushas (Eos), the dawn, is called Sûrya-prabhâ or sunshine.
We have so far watched the daily procession of the Vedic gods as reflected in the hymns, beginning with Agni, as god of light, especially the light of the morning, and in many respects the alter ego of the sun. We saw that in one sense the Dawn also is only a female repetition of the auroral Agni (Agnir aushasya), and we met with a third personification of the morning sun in the shape of Savitri, who is perhaps the most dramatic among the solar heroes, such as Mitra, Âditya, Vishnu and others.