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 Transparent and Opaque Gods I 57

stops to wonder: “There is but one Agni, yet is he kindled manifold” ;‘ and Agni himself is made to say: “Because I can multiply myself by the power of mental concentration (yoga), there- fore am I present in the bodies (of men, as vital ﬁrc:)..”ﬁl

Agni is, next to Indra, the most prominent god of the Rig-Veda, quantitatively speaking. He is the theme of more than two hundred hymns, and owes his special prominence to the personiﬁca- tion of the sacred ﬁre which is present at all Vedic performances. In the hieratic (in distinction from the popular) hymns of the Rig-Veda there will be few cases in which Agni is not more or less directly connected with the sacriﬁce. And it is well now to take this simple article, the sacriﬁce ﬁre, and let it unfold its own story step by step. How it turns in the hands of these priestly poets into a person gifted with the thinly disguised qualities of ﬁre ; into a mes— senger mediating between men and gods; into an archpriest typical of holy rites; and ﬁnally into a god. But to the end, as we shall show, the origin of all these ideas is never forgotten; the god remains a more or less well-assorted bundle of ﬁre qualities and ﬁre epithets. Therefore, too, he remains to the

1 Mahabharata 3. 134.8m10658. ‘2 fatal, 1:. 7. 6m916.