Hindu Gods and Heroes | Page 4

death as a supreme god, devouring his fathers and
mothers, slaughtering the gods, eating their "magical powers," and
swallowing their "spirit-souls," so that he thus becomes "the first-born
of the first-born gods," omniscient, omnipotent, and eternal, identified
with the Osiris, the highest god. Now this Unas was a real historical
man; he was the last king of the Fifth Dynasty, and was deified after
death, just like any other king of Egypt. The early Egyptians, like many
savage tribes, regarded all their kings as gods on earth and paid them
formal worship after their death; the later Egyptians, going a step
further, worshipped them even in their lifetime as embodiments of the
gods.[3] What is said in the liturgy for the deification of Unas is much
the same as was said of other kings. The dead king in early Egypt
becomes a god, even the greatest of the gods, and he assumes the name
of that god[4]; he overcomes the other gods by brute force, he kills and
devours them. This is very like what I think was the case with Zeus; the
main difference is that in Egypt the character of the deified king was
merged in that of the old god, and men continued to regard the latter in
exactly the same light as before; but among the forefathers of the
Greeks the reverse happened in at least one case, that of Zeus, where
the character of a hero who had peculiarly fascinated popular
imagination partly eclipsed that of the old god whose name and rank he
usurped. The reason for this, I suppose, is that even the early Egyptians
had already a conservative religion with fixed traditions and a
priesthood that forgot nothing,[5] whereas among the forefathers of the
Greeks, who were wandering savages, social order and religion were in
a very fluid state. However that may be, a deified hero might oust an
older god and reign under his name; and this theory explains many
difficulties in the legends of Zeus.
[Footnote 2: Sir E. A. W. Budge, Literature of the Ancient Egyptians, p.
21 ff., and Gods of the Egyptians, i, pp. 32 f., 43.]
[Footnote 3: Erman, Handbook of Egyptian Religion, p. 37 f.]
[Footnote 4: Budge, Lit. of the Egyptians, p. 21; Erman, ut supra, p. 37

f.]
[Footnote 5: It is even possible that in one case, that of Osiris, a hero in
Egypt may have eclipsed by his personality the god whom he ousted.
See Sir J. W. Frazer's Adonis, Attis, Osiris, ii, p. 200, and Sir W.
Ridgeway's Dramas and Dramatic Dances, etc., p. 94 ff.]
As to the Roman Iuppiter, I need not say much about him. Like all the
genuine gods of Latium, he never was much more than an abstraction
until the Greeks came with their literature and dressed him in the
wardrobe of their Zeus.
Coming now to Ushas, the Lady of the Dawn, and looking at her name
from the standpoint of comparative philosophy, we see that the word
ushas is closely connected with the Greek [Greek: heôs] and the Latin
aurora. But when we read the literature, we are astonished to find that
while the Greek Dawn-lady has remained almost always a mere
abstraction, the Indian spirit is a lovely, living woman instinct with the
richest sensuous charms of the East. Some twenty hymns are addressed
to her, and for the most part they are alive with real poetry, with a sense
of beauty and gladness and sometimes withal an under-note of sadness
for the brief joys of life. But when we look carefully into it we notice a
curious thing: all this hymn-singing to Ushas is purely literary and
artistic, and there is practically no religion at all at the back of it. A few
stories are told of her, but they seem to convince no one, and she
certainly has no ritual worship apart from these hymns, which are really
poetical essays more than anything else. The priestly poets are thrilled
with sincere emotion at the sight of the dawn, and are inspired by it to
stately and lively descriptions of its beauties and to touching reflections
upon the passing of time and mortal life; but in this scene Ushas herself
is hardly more than a model from an artist's studio, in a very Bohemian
quarter. More than once on account of her free display of her charms
she is compared to a dancing girl, or even a common harlot! Here the
imagination is at work which in course of time will populate the Hindu
Paradise with a celestial corps de ballet, the fair and frail Apsarasas.
Our Vedic Ushas is a forerunner of that gay company. A charming
person, indeed; but certainly no genuine goddess.

As his name shows, Surya is the spirit