General character of the Rig-Veda.

WHEN we prepare to investigate one of the world’s great religions, and before we enter on an analytical study of details, we naturally incline, in our desire to feel firm ground under our feet, to ask the preliminary question : What is its character? in what category should it be classed ? to what division of the spiritual world does it belong? Polytheism? Pantheism? Animism? or what other? When it is the Rig-Veda into which we are about to plunge, we doubly feel the need of some such guiding thread, some anchor to rest upon, for its 1028 hymns, bristling with names and allusions, produce, on a first perusal, a labyrinthine, chaotic, wholly bewildering impression. But alas, a direct, plain answer to such a question is seldom, if ever, possible, and, in the case of the Rig-Veda, perhaps a little less so than in that of any other analogous spiritual document. The growth of a long series of centuries, elaborated in many million busy, subtle brains, containing a great race’s spiritual food for as many centuries to come and materials for endless transformations, could not possibly be so simple and transparent a thing as to admit of a sweeping definition in one word. The study of the Zend-Avesta showed us how many varied elements, and how intricately stratified, go to the making of a great national religion. The same unconscious work of time and influences confronts us in the Veda, but by so much more many-sided and complicated by how much the contemplative, introspective character which the Aryas developed in India is more involved and self-absorbed than that  of their sternly simple, active, and hardy Eranian brethren. Let us, however, attempt to answer the question with which we began the present chapter, just to see how far and deep it will carry us. Even a cursory first study of our text will establish the following points :

A great many gods are named and invoked in the Rig-Veda; consequently, the religion it embodies is decidedly POLYTHEISTIC ; the spirits of deceased ancestors come in for a large share of honor and worship, so that ANIMISM may be said to be a conspicuous feature of it ; an early tendency to view the deity as pervading the universe, both as a whole and in its minutest parts, animate or inanimate— a view exhaustively expressed in such words as these: “He whose loins the seas are” is also “ contained in this drop of water ”—early reveals a strong attraction towards PANTHEISM ; while many are the passages which explicitly inform us that the various gods are only different names of “ that which is One ”—more than hinting at a dim, underlying MONOTHEISM. There is no doubt that the purer and more abstract conceptions could be traced to the later of the many centuries which it took to evolve the Rig-Veda in its final form, if we but had a sure key to its chronology ; as it is, we have only, as in the Avesta, the internal evidence that goes so far in the hands of trained criticism, to support and guide our impressions, our conjectures. But one thing appears sure: Vedic religion at no time, until opened to alien and grosser influences, was idolatrous. In this respect the Aryas of India were in no wise behind their brethren of Eran : nature was their temple; they did not invite the deity to dwell in houses of men’s building, and if, in their poetical effusions, they described their Devas in human form and with fanciful symbolical attributions, thereby unavoidably falling into anthropomorphism, they do not seem to have transferred it into reproductions more materially tangible than the spoken word—into the eidolon (portraiture,—of limner’s, sculptor’s, or potter’s hand) —which becomes the idol.

Chiefly Naturalism.

The birth of Myths.

The Rig-Veda may be shown to contain the germs of most of the religions and even philosophical systems which subsequently covered the spiritual soil of India with crops of such bewildering luxuriancy, the main character of this book of books, in nearly half its mantras,—answering, no doubt, to the earlier and main period of their composition and collection,—is simple and easy to define ; at this earliest and unalloyed stage, the religion which we see faithfully mirrored in them is NATURALISM, pure and simple, i. e. , the worship of the Powers of Nature as Beings, generally beneficent, with only a very few absolutely Evil Ones, such as Darkness and  Drought ; these latter, however, are not worshipped, nor even propitiated, but unconditionally abhorred by men, fought and conquered by the Powers of Good. In this unalloyed naturalism, we can watch the birth of myths and catch it, so to speak, in the act, by the simple proceeding of translating the names of each divine or semi-divine being as it confronts us in an invocation or in a bit of story (for long and especially connected and consistent stories are the works of a later, elaborating, and compiling age). We then perceive, to our astonishment, that they are not names at all, but either matter-of-fact common nouns, direct designations of the natural object under consideration, or else a verbal noun expressing some characteristic action of that object — as “the Pounders,” “the Howlers,” names of the Storm-Winds—or an adjective, a more or less ornate epithet, describing one or other of its characteristic properties or aspects. So that, by merely dismissing the capital initials, we reduce an incipient story —a primary myth containing all the live germs of future poetic and legendary development—into a fanciful, poetical description of a natural phenomenon— like the various stages of the sun’s progress, the incidents of a thunderstorm, the dramatic episodes of a drought. Special illustrations of these positions are scarcely needed here, since all the following pages will, in a measure, consist of such illustrations. But, before we investigate the Vedic natural pantheon, it may not be amiss to repeat the definition of the word MYTH given in another volume, 1 because it should be borne in mind through all the study on which we are entering, and will be found to cover each single case subjected to it. This it is : “A myth means simply a phenomenon of nature presented not as the result of a law, but as the act of divine or at least superhuman persons, good or evil powers. Reading and practice will show that there are many kinds of myths, but there is none which, if properly taken to pieces, thoroughly traced and cornered, will not be covered by this definition.”

The beauty of the Vedic myths is that they need no cornering, no taking to pieces, mostly being themselves embryonic, and resolving themselves, at a touch, back into the natural elements out of which they directly emanated, without as yet materializing into any such flesh-and-blood reality as, say, the biography of a Greek god. We shall never know exactly what the inheritance was which the Aryas of the Sapta-Sindhavah received from the time—the so-called Indo-Eranian period—before the separation of the two sister races, the original material out of which grew the Rig-Veda. But there are some large primary conceptions in it which clearly confront us in the Zend-Avesta also, and which we are therefore justified in ascribing to the original, primeval Aryas, the ancestors of both. We may be tolerably well assured that so much of these primary conceptions as we can trace in the Rig-Veda unalloyed with elements betokening local Indian conditions and influences, represents the earlier stage of the religion which was to become so complicated and manifold. It is not impossible to disentangle these simpler outlines from an intricate aftergrowth, and we are not surprised to find them representing the purest naturalism, with just so much moral consciousness and religious feeling as cannot be absent from the spiritual life of a highly gifted race.

Dyaus and Prithivi

Heaven and Earth.

The poets, the thinkers, and contemplatives of all nations have been attracted to what lay beyond the experience and testimony of their material senses, and have conceived the universe as divided into several “ worlds,” visible and invisible. Obviously the oldest of such speculations, the starting-point for all subsequent ones, is the conception of “ the two worlds”—Heaven and Earth. Many names are given to each in the Rig-Veda, but in their special connection as a divine couple, who between them and by their union have given life to all creatures and are ever supplying them with the means of preserving that life, they are addressed, jointly and inseparably, as Dyaus and Prithiyi. The latter name is singularly direct and unimaginative ; it means simply “ the Broad,” and if it offers any interest, it is from the suggestion of antiquity it contains, since that is scarcely the epithet which would be chosen, out of many, as specially distinctive, in a land of towering peaks and steep-sided ridges, and therefore it does not seem too unlikely that the name, as the conception, may have been familiar prior to the Aryan descent into the Penjab, carrying the mind back to the period (Indo-Eranian ?) of dwelling on flat, boundless plains and steppes.

The root Div Dyaus Deva Asura.

Every natural object fills more than one part or function in the economy of the universe, has more than one quality or aspect wherewith to strike an observer—a variety easily expressed in speech by a number of adjectives and verbs or verbal nouns. If that observer be poetically inclined and therefore subject to moods, he will scarcely be disposed coolly to enumerate all these qualities and actions, producing a sort of dry descriptive litany ; he will be more specially struck, according to the mood of a given moment, by this or that particular aspect of the object of his contemplation ; he will let his fancy dwell on that aspect, suffer himself to be entirely possessed by it, and develop it in his song to the exclusion of all  others, until the reflection in his poet’s soul is rendered tangible in form to his fellow-men, and becomes, although unsubstantial, a perfect, indelible creation. And what is this creation, seen first by the poet in his mind’s eye, then by his cunning word made visible to the world? heard first by him in his mind’s ear, then poured by his cunning metre into music for all ? this creation first revealed to him in that semi-trance of the soul, when the poet is lifted into a world which is not that of every day and where voices speak to him and visions come to him he knows not how? Is it a song ? a picture ? it is all that and more : it is a god. What he has seen and heard, and rendered, is so complete, so real that he is the first to forget that what he started from was really only one of many aspects or qualities belonging to an already familiar deity (divinized natural object, or power), and lo the magic wand of language wielded by fancy has done its work, as the epithet or noun becomes a name, the quality or action it expresses becomes a person, and where there was one god, there now are two, henceforth imagined and worshipped distinctly and separately, in total forgetfulness of their original identity. And what was a poetical description of certain attributions, certain effects, becomes the god’s personal history, the story of his adventures.