That is a strong measure, and a god who once could do that, was no doubt capable of anything afterward. The same idea, namely that Indra is greater than heaven and earth, is expressed in a less outrageous way by another poet, who says[187] that Indra is greater than heaven and earth, and that both together are only a half of Indra. Or again:[188] "The divine Dyaus bowed before Indra, before Indra the great Earth bowed with her wide spaces." "At the birth of thy splendor Dyaus trembled, the Earth trembled for fear of thy anger."[189]
Thus, from one point of view, Heaven and Earth were the greatest gods, they were the parents of everything, and therefore of the gods also, such as Indra and others.
But, from another point of view, every god that was considered as supreme at one time or other, must necessarily have made heaven and earth, must at all events be greater than heaven and earth, and thus the child became greater than the father, ay, became the father of his father. Indra was not the only god that created heaven and earth. In one hymn[190] that creation is ascribed to Soma and Pûshan, by no means very prominent characters; in another[191] to Hiranyagarbha (the golden germ); in another again to a god who is simply called Dhatri, the Creator,[192] or Visvakarman,[193] the maker of all things. Other gods, such as Mitra and Savitri, names of the sun, are praised for upholding Heaven and Earth, and the same task is sometimes performed by the old god Varuna[194] also.
What I wish you to observe in all this is the perfect freedom with which these so-called gods or Devas are handled, and particularly the ease and naturalness with which now the one, now the other emerges as supreme out of this chaotic theogony. This is the peculiar character of the ancient Vedic religion, totally different both from the Polytheism and from the Monotheism as we see it in the Greek and the Jewish religions; and if the Veda had taught us nothing else but this henotheistic phase, which must everywhere have preceded the more highly-organized phase of Polytheism which we see in Greece, in Rome, and elsewhere, the study of the Veda would not have been in vain.
It may be quite true that the poetry of the Veda is neither beautiful, in our sense of the word, nor very profound; but it is instructive. When we see those two giant spectres of Heaven and Earth on the background of the Vedic religion, exerting their influence for a time, and then vanishing before the light of younger and more active gods, we learn a lesson which it is well to learn, and which we can hardly learn anywhere else—the lesson how gods were made and unmade—how the Beyond or the Infinite was named by different names in order to bring it near to the mind of man, to make it for a time comprehensible, until, when name after name had proved of no avail, a nameless God was felt to answer best the restless cravings of the human heart.
I shall next translate to you the hymn to which I referred before as addressed to the Rivers. If the Rivers are to be called deities at all, they belong to the class of terrestrial deities. But the reason why I single out this hymn is not so much because it throws new light on the theogonic process, but because it may help to impart some reality to the vague conceptions which we form to ourselves of the ancient Vedic poets and their surroundings. The rivers invoked are, as we shall see, the real rivers of the Punjâb, and the poem shows a much wider geographical horizon than we should expect from a mere village-bard.[195]
1. "Let the poet declare, O Waters, your exceeding greatness, here in the seat of Vivasvat.[196] By seven and seven they have come forth in three courses, but the Sindhu (the Indus) exceeds all the other wandering rivers by her strength.
2. "Varuna dug out paths for thee to walk on, when thou rannest to the race.[197] Thou proceedest on a precipitous ridge of the earth, when thou art lord in the van of all the moving streams.
3. "The sound rises up to heaven above the earth; she stirs up with splendor her endless power.[198] As from a cloud, the showers thunder forth, when the Sindhu comes, roaring like a bull.
4. "To thee, O Sindhu, they (the other rivers) come as lowing mother-cows (run) to their young with their milk.[199] Like a king in battle thou leadest the two wings, when thou reachest the front of these down-rushing rivers.