Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 6 (Indian and Iranian).djvu/129

THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE BRAHMANAS 85 we meet the word sura denoting "a god," derived by this popular etymology from asura, which is really connected with asu, "breath."

As regards the individual gods we find a clear change in the conception of Varuna, who, with Mitra, is now equated in several places with the night and the day respectively. Moreover in the Atharvaveda and the Brdhmanas there is a distinct tendency to bring Varuna into close connexion with the waters, who are his wives, in whom he is said to dwell, and to whom he is related as Soma to the mountains. His power of punishing the sinner, furthermore, becomes especially prominent in the final bath which terminates the sacrificial ceremony as a normal rule and by which the sacrificers release themselves from Varuna's noose. At the horse sacrifice this bath takes the peculiar form that a man is driven deep into the water and then banished as a scapegoat; and, since the appearance of the scape-goat is to be similar to that of the god, we learn that Varuna was in this connexion conceived as bald-headed, white, yellow-eyed, and leprous. The one festival which is specially his, the Varunapraghasa, is again one of expiation of sin. Yet in his relation to the sacrifice Varuna does not appear in any of the moral splendour of the Rgveda, and he is manifestly tending, as in the epic, to sink to the level of a god of the waters, without special ethical quality.

In the other Adityas there is little change; but the number is now usually either eight or (more often) twelve, which is to be final for later times, when the term is not as often used generically in a sense wide enough to cover all the gods, a use which leads to the epic view that every deity is a child of Aditi. One enumeration of eight gives Varuna, Mitra, Aryaman, Bhaga, Arhsa, Dhatr, Indra, and Vivasvant. The.introduc- tion of Indra is interesting, and the Maitrdyani Samhita (II. i. 12) makes him a son of Aditi, but the connexion is not insisted upon. Mitra decidedly recedes even from the small place which he holds in the Rgveda, perhaps in accordance with