the offerings made to them, in gratifying their bodily wants, and from the praises which impart to them enhanced energy and augmented power. There is nothing, however, which denotes any particular potency in the prayer, or hymn, so as to compel the gods to comply with the desires of the worshipper;-nothing of that enforced necessity which makes so conspicuous and characteristic a figure in the Hindu mythology of a later date, by which the performance of austerities for a continued period constrains the gods to grant the desired boon, although fraught with peril, and even destruction, to themselves.

The next question is: Who are the gods to whom the praises and prayers are addressed? And here we find, also, a striking difference between the mythology of the Rig-Veda and that of the heroic poems and Puráñas. The divinities worshipped are not unknown to later systems: but they there perform very subordinate parts; whilst those deities who are the great gods-the Dii majores-of the subsequent period are either wholly unnamed in the Veda, or are noticed in an inferior and different capacity. The names of S'IVA, of MAHÁDeva, of Durgá, of Kálí, of Ráma, of KRISHNA, never occur, as far as we are yet aware. We have a RUDRA, who, in after times, is identified with S'IVA, but who, even in the Puráñas, is of very doubtful origin and identification, whilst, in the Veda, he is described as the father of the winds, and is, evidently, a form of either AGNI or INDRA. The epithet KAPARDIN, which is applied to him, appears, indeed, to have some relation to a characteristic attribute of S'Iva,—

the wearing of his hair in a peculiar braid: but the term has, probably, in the Veda, a different signification, -one now forgotten,-although it may have suggested, in after time, the appearance of S'IVA, in such a headdress, as identified with AGNI. For instance, KaparDIN may intimate his head being surrounded by radiating flame; or the word may be an interpolation. At any rate, no other epithet applicable to S'IVA, occurs; and there is not the slightest allusion to the form in which, for the last ten centuries, at least, he seems to have been almost exclusively worshipped in India, -that of the Linga or Phallus. Neither is there the slightest hint of another important feature of later Hinduism, the Trimúrti, or triune combination of BRAHMÁ, VISHNU, and S'IVA, as typified by the mystical syllable Om; although, according to high authority on the religions of antiquity, the Trimúrti was the first element in the faith of the Hindus, and the second was the Lingam."

The chief deities of the Veda are, as has been noticed above, AGNI and INDRA. The former comprises the element of Fire under three aspects: 1st, as it exists on earth, not only as culinary, or religious, fire, but as the heat of digestion and of life, and the vivifying principle of vegetation; 2nd, as it exists in the atmosphere, or mid-heaven, in the form of lightning; and, 3rd, as it is manifested in the heavens, as light, the dawn, and the planetary bodies. The Sun, it is true, is acknowledged and hymned as a divinity,

the sun,

a

Creuzer, Religions de l'Antiquité, Book I., Chap. 1.: p. 140.

the soul of all moveable and immoveable beings; and his manifestations are already known as ÁDITYAS, including several of the names preserved in the Puráñas, as VISHNU, MITRA, VARUÑA, ARYAMAN, PÚSHAN, BHAGA, and TWASHTRI, who are nothing more than the Sun diversified as presiding over each month of the solar year. Still, however, the sun does not hold that prominent place, in the Vaidik liturgy, which he seems to have done in that of the ancient Persians; and he is chiefly venerated as the celestial representative of Fire.

If we advert more particularly to the attributes of AGNI, we find that confusion, in them, which might be expected from the various characters he fills. As the fire of sacrifice, he is the servant of both men and gods, conveying the invocations and the offerings of the former to the latter; he is the Hotri, or priest, who summons the gods to the ceremony; the Purohita, or family priest, who performs the rite on behalf of the master of the house. Personified as a divinity, he is immortal, enjoying perpetual youth, endowed with infinite power and splendour, the granter of victory, of wealth, of cattle, of food, of health, of life; he travels in a car drawn by red horses; he is the source and diffuser of light, the destroyer and reviver of all things. He is known under many and various appellations; and many inferior deities are considered to be merely his manifestations. The acts and attributes of other deities are, not unfrequently, ascribed to him (p. 179): he may assume the form or nature of any other divinity

(p. 184) who is invoked to a ceremonial rite. He is identified with YAMA, VARUÑA, MITRA, with the Sun, and with the eternal VEDHAS (p. 190). A curious series of allusions, evidently of a remote antiquity, identifies him with ANGIRAS, who, in the Veda, as well as in the Puráñas, is a patriarch and Ṛishi, and the founder of a celebrated holy family, to members of which many of the hymns of the Veda are attributed. ANGIRAS is, in one place (p. 3), used instead of the repetition of the name AGNI; and, in another, AGNI is expressly called the first and chiefest ANGIRAS (p. 79). The meaning of this myth is, apparently, explained in another passage, in which it is said that the ANGIRASAS first made sure of AGNI, whence subsequent votaries preserved his fires and practised his rites (p. 187); which clearly intimates that this priestly family, or school, either introduced worship with fire, or extended and organized it in the various forms in which it came, ultimately, to be observed. The tenour of the legend, as it was afterwards expanded in the Bráhmañas and heroic poems, equally intimates the latter, and refers the multiplication, or universality, of the occasions on which fire constituted an essential element of the worship of the Hindus, to ANGIRAS and his descendants. Of the attributes of AGNI, in general, the meaning is sufficiently obvious: those of a physical character speak for themselves; and the allegory conveyed by others is, either, palpable enough, as when

See the passage of the Mahábhárata, cited in note d, p. 3.

AGNI is said to be the son of the Wind, or springs, naturally, from Hindu notions, as when he is said to be both the father and the son of the gods,-nourishing them, like a father, by the oblations he bears to them, while the act of offering those oblations is the duty of a son. The legend of his hiding in the waters, through fear of the enemies of the gods, although alluded to in more than one place (pp. 58, 177), is not very explicitly narrated; and its more circumstantial detail is, probably, the work of the Bráhmañas. The allusions of the Suktas may be a figurative intimation of the latent heat existing in water, or a misapprehension of a natural phenomenon which seems to have made a great impression, in later times, -the emission of flame from the surface of water, either in the shape of inflammable air, or as the result of submarine volcanic action.a

The deification of INDRA is more consistent, as he has no incongruous functions to discharge. He is a personification of the phenomena of the firmament, particularly in the capacity of sending down rain. This property is metaphorically described as a conflict with the clouds, which are reluctant to part with their watery stores, until assailed and penetrated by the thunderbolt of INDRA. As in all allegories, the language of fact and fiction is apt to be blended and confounded in the description of this encounter; and the cloud, personified as a demon named AHI or VṚITRA, is represented as combating INDRA with all the attri

a See the legend of Aurva, Vishnu Puráña, p. 290, note.