Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 6 (Indian and Iranian).djvu/79

Rh his worshippers chariots, horses, gold, heaven, water, and a thousand boons. He bears terrible, sharp weapons, including a thousand-pointed shaft. Again like Indra he is described as a bull, and the waters are the cows, which he fertilizes. He rides in Indra's car, and the Maruts are his friends; the winds gladden him, and Vāyu is his guardian.

The abode of Soma is in the mountains, of which Mūjavant is specially mentioned, nor need we doubt that the mountains are primarily of earth. But Soma is also celestial, and his birth is in heaven. He is the child of the sky or of the sun or of Parjanya. He is the lord, the bird of heaven, he stands above all worlds like the god Sūrya; the drops, when purified in the strainer (mystically the heaven), pour from the air upon the earth. The myth of his descent from the sky is variously told: the swift eagle brought the soma for Indra through the air with his foot; flying swift as thought, he broke through the iron castles, and going to heaven, he bore the soma down for Indra. Yet the eagle did not perform his feat unscathed, for as he fled with the soma, the archer Kṛśānu shot at him and knocked out a feather. The myth seems to denote that the lightning in the form of the eagle burst through the castle of the storm-cloud and brought down the water of the cloud, conceived as the ambrosia, while at the same time fire came to earth.

Soma is also the king of rivers, the king of the whole earth, the king or father of the gods, and the king of gods and mortals; though often called a god, in one passage he is expressly styled a god pressed for the gods.

As early as the Ṛgveda there is some trace of that identification of the moon with Soma which is fully accomplished in the Brāhmaṇa period. Thus in the marriage hymn (x. 85) in which Sūryā, the sun-maiden, is said to be wedded to Soma he is spoken of as in the lap of the nakṣatras, or lunar mansions, and it is stated that no one eats of that soma which is known by the priest; while the same identification may be at the bottom