Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/145

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The Prehistoric Gods 129

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Truth and lie include, by an easy transition, right and wrong-doing. In a famous hymnll Yarn'i' (Eve). invites Yama (Adana) to incestuous intercourse. Mythically speaking this is, of course, unavoidable: they are the ﬁrst pair, and there are no other human beings whatsoever. But the poet conceives of the situation in the spirit of his own time. When Yarn? pretends to justify the act Yama exclaims pithily: “ In saying the rm we shall really say the mzﬂa,” which. rendered more broadly, means to say: “ When We pretend to justify the act as being rm, ‘rightm doing,’ we really shall knowingly engage in eerie, ‘wrongsdoingy’ We may imagine Yams. ﬁnally saying: “Anyhow, don’t let us beat the devil about the stump l ”

Varuna and Mitra, the dual pair, are implicated still further in a group df divinities of the name ddz’z‘yn. The number of these gods is very uncer- tain. Sometimes it is three: Mitra and Varuna, with Aryaman as third. This third god, no less than the ﬁrst two, is Indo-Iranian: the name of Aryaman’s Avestan counterpart is Airyama. The name of this not tends-terminate god seems to mean “ comrade ”; accordingly Aryaman ﬁgures in the Veda as the typical groomsman at the wedding rites. Beyond this triad the name n'dz'tya becomes very indeﬁnite,

1 Rig-Veda. 10. IO. 9