Hindu Gods and Heroes | Page 6

rank; but even
they cannot do it. From the days of the earliest generations of men Fire
was a spirit; and the household fire, which cooks the food of the family

and receives its simple oblations of clarified butter, is a kindly genius
of the home. But with all his usefulness and elfish mystery Fire simply
remains fire, and there's an end of it, for the ordinary man. But the
priests will not have it so. The chief concern of their lives is with
sacrifice, and their deepest interest is in the spirit of the sacrificial fire.
All the riches of their imagination and their vocabulary are lavished
upon him, his forms and his activities. They have devoted to him about
200 hymns and many occasional verses, in which they dwell with
constant delight and ingenious metaphor upon his splendour, his power,
his birth from wood, from the two firesticks, from trees of the forest,
from stones, or as lightning from the clouds, his kinship with the sun,
his dwelling in three abodes (viz. as a rule on earth, in the clouds as
lightning, and in the upper heavens as the sun), his place in the homes
of men as a holy guest, a friend and a kinsman, his protection of
worshippers against evil spirits and malignant sorcerers, and especially
his function of conveying the oblation poured into his flames up to the
gods. Thus they are led to represent him as the divine Priest, the ideal
hierophant, in whom are united the functions of the three chief classes
of Rigvedic sacrificial priests, the hota, adhvaryu, and brahman, and
hence as an all-knowing sage and seer. If infinite zeal and ingenuity in
singing Agni's praises and glorifying his activities can avail to raise
him to the rank of a great god, we may expect to find him very near the
top. But it is not to be. The priests cannot convince the plain man of
Agni's super-godhead, and soon they will fail to convince even
themselves. The time will shortly come when they will regard all these
gods as little more than puppets whose strings are pulled by the
mysterious spirit of the sacrifice.
The priests have another pet deity, Soma. For the sacred rites include
the pressing and drinking of the fermented yellow juice of the
soma-plant, an acid draught with intoxicating powers, which when
mixed with milk and drunk in the priestly rites inspires religious
ecstasy. This drinking of the soma-juice is already an ancient and
important feature in the worship of our Aryans, as it is also among their
kinsmen in Iran; so it is no wonder that the spirit of the sacred plant has
been made by the priests into an important deity and celebrated with
endless abundance of praise and prayer. As with Agni, Soma's

appearance and properties are described with inexhaustible wealth of
epithets and metaphors. The poets love to dwell on the mystic powers
of this wonderful potion, which can heal sickness of soul and body and
inspire gods and men to mighty deeds and holy ecstasy. Most often
they tell how the god Indra drank huge potions of it to strengthen
himself for his great fight with the dragon Vritra. Most of this worship
is of priestly invention; voluminous as its rhetoric is, it makes no great
impression on the laity, nor perhaps on the clergy either. Some of the
more ingenious of the priests are already beginning to trace an affinity
between Soma and the moon. The yellow soma-stalks swell in the
water of the pressing-vat, as the yellow moon waxes in the sky; the
soma has a magical power of stimulation, and the moon sends forth a
mystic liquid influence over the vegetation of the earth, and especially
over magic plants; the soma is an ambrosia drunk by gods and heroes
to inspire them to mighty deeds, and the moon is a bowl of ambrosia
which is periodically drunk by the gods and therefore wanes month by
month. The next step will soon be taken, and the priests will say that
Soma is the moon; and literature will then obediently accept this
statement, and, gradually forgetting nearly everything that Soma meant
to the Rigvedic priests, will use the name Soma merely as a secondary
name for Chandra, the moon and its god. A very illuminating process,
which shows how a god may utterly change his nature. Now we turn to
the hero-gods.
Indra and the Asvina at the beginning came to be worshipped because
they were heroes, men who were supposed to have wrought
marvellously noble and valiant deeds in dim far-off days, saviours of
the afflicted, champions of the right, and who for this reason were
worshipped after death, perhaps even before death, as divine beings,
and gradually became associated in