Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/149

 The Prehistoric Gods 133,

.—

Now what is the natural origin of that other partner in the dual partnership, namely, Vedic Va- runa the Asura,Avestan Allure. Mazda? Not very many years ago Professor Oldenberg advanced and defended ingeniously the hypothesis 1 that Varuna is the Moon, and this theory he did not hesitate to follow to a very logical conclusion. Mitra and Varuna are Sun and Moon. They are members, as we have seen, in a group of gods called Adityas. Oldenberg chooses, perhaps a little hastily, the number seven as the sum total of this group.“ Simi— larly in the Avesta, Ahura is accompanied by the so— called “Immortal Holy Ones,” the Amesha Spents, the angels of the Puritan Zoroastrian faith. They also make up the number seven. Mithra, we may note, is altogether absent from the Avestan arrange- ment. Now Oldenberg believes not only that Varuna and Mitra were the Moon and the Sun, but that the Adityas, essentially identical with the Amesha Spents, were the planets. He assumes still further that the whole set, originally, were not Indo~

EurOpean divinities at all, but that they were her-- rowed by" the Aryans from a Shemitic peoplem presumably the Babyloniansmfar enough advanced

1 See his latest treatment of the matter in Zeitscx’zrift tier Deut- scﬁm Afarganlrﬁadfsdzm Gerellscizafz‘, vol. 1., p. 43 9 See above, p. 129.