Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/104

 The Religion of the Veda ishad thought, as it appears, for instance, in the Taittiriya Upanishad (8. 8): "He who dwells in man and he who dwells in the sun are one and the same. But this later thought is founded on the repeated revision, so to say, of the concep- tions of the sun, fed anew by the sight of this engrossing nature force, which is not obscured and not made trivial by personification into an Olympian, human god. But we shall return to this all-important matter when we come to the highest outcome of Vedic reli- gion. It is now time to take a look at the individual gods of the Veda, or what we may call the Vedic Pantheon. 88 THE PANTHEON OF THE VEDA. At the outset we may observe that this word ap- plies to the Vedic gods only in an analogical sense. There is no Pantheon in the Veda, if by Pantheon we mean an Olympus patterned after a more or less snobbish conception of a royal household, in which every god holds his position and exacts sensitive respect from all the others as the price of his own observance of court proprieties. The Vedic gods have no acknowledged head. They group them- selves to some extent according to their characters; for instance, as sun-gods, or storm-gods. As such 2