Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/94

 The Religion of the Veda The ous priest families for this important sacrifice. soma drink is pressed three times daily morning, noon, and evening. The gods of the Vedic Pantheon are all interested in these ceremonies; each has a fairly definite share in them. Indra, the god who figures more frequently than any other, has part in all three pressings; but the mid-day pressing belongs to him exclusively. Ushas, the Maiden Dawn, and Agni, God Fire, play, as we have seen, a very important part in the morning. The Adityas' and Ribhus, the latter a sort of clever-handed elves, appear upon the scene in the evening. A host of hymns are addressed to pairs of divinities whose coupling is not always based upon any special natural affinity between them, but upon purely liturgic association: Indra and Agni, Indra and Varuna, Agni and Soma, and so on. One important class of hymns, the so-called apri- hymns, that is, songs of invitation," consist of individual stanzas which invoke certain divinitics and personifications of acts and utensils, prelimin- ary to the sacrifice of cattle at the soma rites.' God Fire (Agni) is especially called upon under different, 78 (6 1 See below, p. 129. 2 See Max Müller, History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, P. 463 ; Roth, Yaska's Nirukta, p. xxxvi ff; Weber, Indische Studien, x. 89 ff; Grassmann, Translation of the Rig-Veda, vol. i., p. 6; Bergaigne, Journal Asiatique, 1879, p. 17.