Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/105

 The Pantheon of the Veda 89 In the they have more or less definite habitations. time of the great Epic, the Mahabharata, no one knows how many hundreds of years later, they really do manage to foregather in the heaven of one of them, namely, Indra's heaven. They begin to take rank: Indra first, Agni second, and so on. With that comes a little, very little, of those roseate poetic and plastic possibilities which the poets and artists of all ages have read into the finishedly human Greek Olympus. We have seen enough of our theme to know that many gods of the Veda are scarcely more than half persons, their other half being an active force of nature. Such material is not yet ripe even for a Hindu Olympus. The mind of the Vedic poet is the rationalistic mind of the ruminating philosopher, rather than the artistic mind which reproduces the finished product. It is en- gaged too much in reasoning about and constantly altering the wavering shapes of the gods, so that these remain to the end of Vedic time too uncertain in outline, too fluid in substance for the modelling hand of the artist. On a pinch we could imagine a statue of the most material of the Vedic gods, Indra; but it is hard to imagine a statue of the god Varuna. As a matter of fact there is no record of Vedic ikons, or Vedic temples. In all these senses there is no Vedic Pantheon.