Hindu Gods and Heroes | Page 7

their legends and the forms of their
worship with all kinds of other gods. Times change, gods grow old and
fade away, but the remembrance of great deeds lives on in strange wild
legends, which, however much they may borrow from other worships
and however much they may be obscured by the phantom lights of false
fancy, still throw a glimmer of true light back through the darkness of
the ages into an immeasurably distant past.

Indra is a mighty giant, tawny of hair and beard and tawny of aspect.
The poets tell us that he bears up or stretches out earth and sky, even
that he has created heaven and earth. He is a monarch supreme among
the gods, the lord of all beings, immeasurable and irresistible of power.
He rides in a golden chariot drawn by two tawny horses, or many
horses, even as many as eleven hundred, and he bears as his chief
weapon the vajra, or thunderbolt, sometimes also a bow with arrows, a
hook, or a net. Of all drinkers of soma he is the lustiest; he swills many
lakes of it, and he eats mightily of the flesh of bulls and buffaloes. To
his worshippers he gives abundance of wealth and happiness, and he
leads them to victory over hostile tribes of Aryans and the still more
dreaded hordes of dark-skins, the Dasas and Dasyus. He guided the
princes Yadu and Turvasa across the rivers, he aided Divodasa
Atithigva to discomfit the dark-skinned Sambara, he gave to Divodasa's
son Sudas the victory over the armies of the ten allied kings beside the
river Parushni. Many are the names of the devils and demons that have
fallen before him; but most glorious of all his deeds is the conquest of
Vritra, the dragon dwelling in a mountain fastness amidst the waters,
where Indra, accompanied by the troop of Maruts, or storm-gods, slew
the monster with his bolt and set free the waters, or recovered the
hidden kine. Our poets sing endless variations on this theme, and
sometimes speak of Indra repeating the exploit for the benefit of his
worshippers, which is as much as to say that they, or at least some of
them, think it an allegory.
In all this maze of savage fancy and priestly invention and wild
exaggeration there are some points that stand out clearly. Indra is a god
of the people, particularly of the fighting man, a glorified type of the
fair-haired, hard-fighting, hard-drinking forefathers of the Indian
Aryans and their distant cousins the Hellenes; and therefore he is the
champion of their armies in battles. He is not a fiction of hieratic
imagination, whom priests regale with hyperbolic flattery qualified
only by the lukewarmness of their belief in their own words. He is a
living personality in the faith of the people; the priests only invent
words to express the people's faith, and perhaps add to the old legends
some riddling fancies of their own. Many times they tell us that after
conquering Vritra and setting free the waters or the kine Indra created

the light, the dawn, or the sun; or they say that he produced them
without mentioning any fight with Vritra; sometimes they speak of him
as setting free "the kine of the Morning," which means that they
understood the cows to signify the light of morning, and it would seem
also that they thought that the waters mentioned in the story signified
the rain. But why do they speak of these acts as heroic deeds, exploits
of a mighty warrior, in the same tone and with the same epic fire as
when they sing of Indra's battles in times near to their own, real battles
in which their own forefathers, strong in their faith in the god, shattered
the armies of hostile Aryan tribes or the fortresses of dark-skinned
natives? The personality of Indra and the spirit in which his deeds are
recounted remind us of hero-sagas; the allegories which the poets read
into them are on the other hand quite in the style of the priest. How can
we explain the presence of these two voices? Besides, why should the
setting free of the rain or the daylight be a peculiarly heroic attribute of
Indra? Other gods are said to do the same things as part of their regular
duties: Parjanya, Mitra and Varuna, Dyaus, dispense the rain, others the
light.
The explanation is simple. Indra, it seems to me, is a god of just the
same sort as Zeus, whose nature and history I have already explained
according to my lights. In the far-away past Indra was simply a hero:
very likely he was once a chieftain on earth. The story of his great
deeds so fascinated the imagination of men that they worshipped his