Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 6 (Indian and Iranian).djvu/40

20 one who boasts of having drunk himself into intoxication with soma. He seems once to have fought with all the gods, to have shattered the car of Dawn, and even to have slain his father; and he actually quarrelled with his faithful henchmen, the Maruts. To their worshippers the gods are good and kind, and for them they slay the demons, with whom they wage a war which is triumphant if seemingly incessant. They richly bless the sacrificer and punish the niggard. They are true and not deceitful, although Indra again departs from the highest standard by his use of wiles, even without a good end to justify the means. Moral grandeur is practically confined to Varuṇa, and the greatness and the might of the gods are extolled far more often than their goodness. Their power over men is unlimited: none may defy their ordinances or live beyond the period allotted by them, nor is there aught that can subdue them, save in so far as they are said sometimes not to be able to transgress the moral order of Mitra and Varuṇa.

The pantheon which the Ṛgveda presents is essentially artificial, for as regards by far the greater part of the collection it contains hymns used in the Soma ritual, whence it gives only an imperfect conception of the gods as a whole. Thus, excepting in the tenth book, which contains a short group of hymns (14-18) constituting a sort of collection for Yama (the primeval man and the king of the departed), we learn nothing of the dead and very little of the spirits. Moreover, it is only in quite inadequate measure that we meet with the more domestic side of religion or with the belief in magic and witchcraft in their application to the needs of ordinary life. We cannot, therefore, feel any assurance that the comparative importance of the gods as they might be judged from their prominence in the Ṛgveda affords any real criterion of their actual position in the life of any Vedic tribe, though doubtless it does reflect their rank in the views of the group of priestly families whose traditions, united in a whole, are presented to us in the Ṛgveda. From the text itself it would seem that Indra, Agni, and Soma