How did the god of the heavens become the organizing god, the supreme
God, the moral God? How was the abstract conception grafted on the
naturalistic conception? What is the connection between his material
attribute and his abstract function? The Vedas give the solution of this
problem.
As far as the eye can reach, it can never reach beyond the sky; whatever
is, is under the immense vault; all that which is born and dies, is born
and dies within its bounds. Now, whatever takes place in it, takes place
according to an immutable law. The dawn has never failed to appear at
her appointed place in the morning, never forgotten where she is to
appear again, nor the moment at which she is to reanimate the world.
Darkness and light know their appointed hour, and always at the desired
moment "the black One has given way to the white." Linked together by
the same chain in the endless path open before them, they follow their
way onwards, the two immortals, directed by a God, absorbing each
other's tints. The two fertile sisters do not clash with one another;
they never stop, dissimilar in form, but alike in spirit. Thus run the
days with their suns, the nights with their stars, season following
season. The sky has always in regular course ushered in by turn the day
and the night. The moon has always lit up at the fixed hour. The stars
have always known where they should go during the day. The rivers have
always flowed into the one ocean without making it full.
This universal order is either the motion of the heavens, or it is the
action of the God of heaven, according as we think of the body or the
soul, and view in the heavens the thing or the God. Thus, in the
Rig-Veda, to say "everything is _in_ Varuna"--that is, "in the
heavens"--and to say "everything is _through_ Varuna"--that is, "through
the heaven-God"--are one and the same thing; and in these formulæ of the
Veda, so clear in their uncertainty, theism is ever found side by side
with unconscious pantheism, of which it is only an expression. "The
three heavens and the three earths rest in Varuna," says a poet, and
immediately afterwards, giving personality to his God: "It is the
skilful king Varuna who makes this golden disc shine in heaven." The
wind which whistles in the atmosphere is his breath, and all that exists
from one world to the other was created by him. "From the king Varuna
come this earth below, and yonder heaven, too, these two worlds with
remote limits; the two seas are the belly of Varuna, and he rests also
even in the small pool of water."
This pantheistic theism, which makes no clear distinction between the
God of heaven and the universe over which he rules, or which is
comprised in him, penetrates Jupiter as well as Varuna. The Latin poets
offer the equivalent of the vacillating formulæ of Vedism. "The
mortals," says Lucretius, explaining the origin of the idea of God, "the
mortals saw the regular motions of the heavens and the various seasons
of the year succeed each other in a fixed order, without being able to
discover the causes. They had, therefore, no other alternative than to
attribute all to the gods, who made everything go according to their
will, and it was in the sky that they placed the seat and domain of the
gods, because it is there that may be seen revolve the night and the
noon, the day and the gloomy planets of the night; the nocturnal lights
wandering in the sky, and the flying flames, the clouds, the sun, the
rain, the snow, the winds, the thunderbolts, the hail, the sudden
convulsions, and the great threatening rumblings."[53]
This view of the heavens as the universal centre of the movements of
Nature might just as well have led to pantheism as to theism. The line
of the poet: "Juppiter est quodcunque vides, quocunque
moveris"--"Jupiter is everything that thou seest, everywhere that thou
movest"--does not refer only to the Jupiter of the metaphysicians of the
Porch; it also expresses one of the aspects of the Jupiter of primitive
mythology. It was not by a deviation from his earlier nature that Zeus
was confounded with Pan; he was Pan by birth; and if the epopee and the
drama show us only a personal Zeus, it is because by their very nature
they could and should see him only under this aspect, and had nothing to
obtain from the impersonal Zeus, although in this form he was as old as
in the other. And the Orphic theologian is not quite unfaithful to the
earlier tradition of religion, when he sings of the universal Zeus:--
"Zeus was the first, Zeus is the last, Zeus the thunderer;
Zeus is the head, Zeus is the middle; it is by Zeus that all things
are made;
Zeus is the male, Zeus is the immortal female;
Zeus is the base of both the earth and the starry sky;
Zeus is the breath of the winds, Zeus is the jet of the
unconquerable flame;
Zeus is the root of the sea, Zeus is the sun and the moon....
The whole of this universe is stretched out within the great body
of Zeus."
In the same manner, although Persia has in general preserved the
personality of her Supreme god, yet she suffers him, especially in the
sects, to become confounded with the Infinity of matter through which he
first revealed himself to the mind of his worshippers. After having
invoked the heavens as the body of Ahura Mazda, the most beautiful of
bodies, she placed above Ahura himself, and before him, the luminous
space, where he manifests himself, what the theologians called "the
Infinite light," and then by a new and higher abstraction declared
_Space_[54] to have been at the beginning of the world. Between this
wholly metaphysical principle and the naturalistic principle of the
primitive religion, there is only the distance of two abstractions:
Space is only the bare form of the luminous Infinite, and the luminous
Infinite, again, is an abstraction from the Infinite and luminous sky,
which was identical with Ahura.
Thus, accordingly as the heavens were considered as the seat or as the
cause of things, the god of the heavens became the matter of the world
or the demiurge of the world. From the period of Aryan unity, he was
without doubt the one and the other in turn; but it is probable that the
theistic conception was more clearly defined than the other, as it is so
in the derived mythologies; it has besides deeper roots in the human
heart and human nature, which in every movement and in every phenomenon
sees a Living Cause, a Personality.
This god of the heavens, having organized the world, is all wisdom; he
is the skilled artisan who has regulated the motion of the worlds. His
wisdom is infinite, for of all those mysteries which man tries in vain
to fathom he has the key, he is the author. But it is not only as the
Creator of the world that he is omniscient: he knows all things,
because, being all light, he sees all things. In the naturalistic
psychology of the Aryans, to see and to know, light and knowledge, eye
and thought, are synonymous terms. With the Hindoos, Varuna is
omniscient because he is the Infinite light; because the sun is his eye;
because from the height of his palace with its pillars of red brass, his
white looks command the world; because under the golden mantle that
covers him, his thousands, his myriads of spies, active and untiring
agents, sunbeams during the day, stars during the night, search out for
him all that which exists from one world to the other, with eyes that
never sleep, never blink. And in the same way, if Zeus is the
all-seeing, the =panoptês=, it is because his eye is the sun, this
universal witness, the infallible spy of both gods and men (= Theôn
skopon êde kai andrôn=). The light knows the truth, it is all truth;
truth is the great virtue which the god of heaven claims; and lying is
the great crime which he punishes. In Homer, the Greek taking an oath,
raises his eyes towards the expanse of heaven and calls Zeus and the sun
to witness; in Persia, the god of heaven resembles in body the light,
and in soul the truth: Aryan morality came down from heaven in a ray of
light.
His Destiny.
Thus, the Indo-European religion knew a supreme God, and this God was
the God of the heavens. He has organized the world and rules it,
because, as he is the heaven, all is in him, and all passes within him,
according to his law; he is omniscient and moral, because, being
luminous, he sees all things and all hearts.
This God was named by the various names of the sky--Dyaus, Varana, Svar,
which, according to the requirements of the thought, described either
the object or the person, the heavens or the God. Later on, each
language made a choice, and fixed the proper name of the God on one of
these words; by which its ancient value as a common noun was lost or
rendered doubtful: thus, in Greek _Dyaus_ became the name of the
heaven-god (Zeus) and Varana (=Ouranos=) was the name of the heavens, as
a thing; in Sanscrit _Dyaus_ or _Svar_ was the material heavens; the
heaven-god was Varana (later changed into Varuna); the Slavs fixed on
the word Svar, by means of a derivative, Svarogu, the idea of the
celestial god; the Romans made the same choice as the Greeks with their
_Jup-piter_, and set aside the other names of the heavens; lastly,
Persia described the god by one of his abstract epithets, the Lord,
Ahura, and obliterated the external traces of his former naturalistic
character.
This god, who reigned at the time of the breaking up of the religion of
Aryan unity, was carried away, with the various religions which sprang
up from it, to the various regions where chance brought the Aryan
migrations. Of the five religions over which he ruled, three remained
faithful to him to the last, and only forsook him at the moment when
they themselves perished;--they are those of the Greeks, of the Romans,
and of the Slavs, with whom Zeus, Juppiter, and Svarogu preserved the
titles and attributes of the Supreme god of the Aryans, as long as the
national religion lasted. They succumbed to Christ; "Heaven-father" gave
way to the "Father who is in Heaven."
India, on the contrary, very soon forgot that god for whose origin and
formation, however, she accounts much better than any other Aryan
religion does; and it was not a foreign god who dethroned him--a god
from without--but a native god, a god of his own family, Indra, the hero
of the tempest.
In fact, the supreme god of the Aryans was not a god of unity; the
Asura, the Lord, was not the Lord in the same sense as Adonai. There
were by the side of him, within himself, a number of gods, acting of
their own accord, and often of independent origin. The wind, the rain,
the thunder; the fire under its three forms--the sun in the heavens, the
lightning in the cloud, the terrestrial fire on the altar; the prayer
under its two forms--the human prayer, which ascends from the altar to
heaven, and the heavenly prayer, which resounds in the din of the storm,
on the lips of a divine priest, and descends from the heights with the
torrents of libations poured from the cup of heaven, all the forces of
nature, both concrete and abstract, appealing at once to the eye and to
the imagination of man, were instantly deified. If the god of the
heavens, greater in time and space, always present and everywhere
present, easily rose to the supreme rank, carried there by his double
Infinity, yet others, with a less continuous, but more dramatic action,
revealing themselves by sudden, unexpected events, maintained their
ancient independence, and religious development might lead to their
usurping the power of the king of the heavens. Already during the middle
of the Vedic period, Indra, the noisy god of the storm, ascends the
summit of the Pantheon, and eclipses his majestic rival by the din of
his resounding splendour.
He is the favourite hero of the Vedic Rishis; they do not tire of
telling how he strikes with his bolt the serpent of the cloud, which
enfolds the light and the waters; how he shatters the cavern of Cambara,
how he delivers the captive Auroras and cows, who will shed torrents of
light and milk on the earth. It is he who makes the sun come out again;
it is he who makes the world, annihilated during the night, reappear; it
is he who recreates it, he who creates it. In a whole series of hymns he
ascends to the side of Varuna, and shares the empire with him; at last
he mounts above him, and becomes the Universal King:--
"He, who, as soon as he was born, a god of thought, has surpassed
the gods by the power of his intellect, he whose trembling made the
two worlds quake by the power of his strength--O man, it is Indra!
"He, who has firmly established the tottering earth and arrested the
quivering mountains; he who has fixed the extent of the
wide-stretching atmosphere, and who has propped up the sky,--O man,
it is Indra!
"He, who, after slaying the serpent, unpenned the seven rivers; who
brought forth the cows from their hiding-place in the cavern; he,
who, by the clashing of the two stones, has engendered Agni,--O man,
it is Indra!
"He, who made all these great things; he, who struck down the demon
race, driving it to concealment; he, who, like a fortunate gamester
who wins at play, carries off the wealth of the impious,--O man, it
is Indra!
"He, who gives life to both rich and poor, and to the priest his
singer who implores him; the god with beautiful lips; the protecting
god who brings the stones together to press out the soma,--O man, it
is Indra!
"He, who has in his hands the herds of horses and cows, the cities
and the chariots of war; he, who has created the Sun and the dawn;
he, who rules the waters,--O man, it is Indra!
"He, who is invoked by the two contending armies, by the enemies
facing each other, either triumphant or beaten; he, whom, when they
meet in the struggle on the same chariot, during the onslaught, they
invoke against each other,--O man, it is Indra!
"He, who discovered Çambara in the mountains where he had been
hidden forty years; he, who killed the serpent in his full strength,
who struck him dead on the body of Dânu,[55]--O man, it is Indra!
"Heaven and earth bow down before him; when he shakes, the mountains
tremble; the drinker of soma, look at him! bearing the bolt in his
arm, the bolt in his hand,--O man, it is Indra!"
But the usurper does not enjoy his triumph long; in the heat of his
victory he is already stung to the heart, mortally wounded by a new and
mystic power which is growing at his side, the power of prayer, of
sacrifice, of worship, of _Brahma_, whose reign begins to dawn towards
the end of the Vedic period, and which is still in existence.
What Indra did in India during an historical period, Perkun and Odin did
in a pre-historical period, the one among the Lithuanians, the other
among the Germans. Perkun and Odin are the Indras of these two nations,
and have each dethroned the god of the heavens. Perkun was the god of
the thunder with the Lithuanian pagans, and one can recognize in him a
twin brother of the Hindoo _Parjanya_, one of the forms of the god of
the storm in Vedic mythology. This king of the Lithuanian Pantheon is a
king of recent date; what proves it is that the Slavs, so closely
related to the Lithuanians in their beliefs, as well as in their
language, and who also knew the god Perkun, have still as their Supreme
god the Supreme god of the ancient Aryan religion, the god of the
heavens, Svarogu.
The same revolution took place in Germany, but in a more remote period.
The god of the heavens has vanished; he is replaced by the god of the
stormy atmosphere, Odin, or Wuotan, the Vâta of India, the warrior god
who is heard in the din of the tempest, leading his dishevelled bands of
warriors, or letting loose on a celestial quarry the howling packs of
the wild chase.
Thus did the Greeks, the Romans, and the Slavs allow their god to be
vanquished by a foreign god; the Germans, the Lithuanians, and the
Hindoos themselves forsook him for an inferior creation. Only in one
single nation he finds worshippers faithful to the last. They are not
numerous, but they have not allowed their belief to be encroached upon
either by time or by man. We mean the few thousands of Ghebers or
Parsis, who, during the great political and religious shipwreck of
Persia, fleeing before the victorious sword of the Prophet, kept from
Islam the treasure of their old belief, and who to this day, in the year
1879 of the Christian era, in the fire temples in Bombay, offer up
sacrifices to the very same god who was sung by the unknown ancestors of
the Aryan race at a time which eludes the grasp of history.