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COMMON INDO-EUROPEAN GODS.

to all the Indo-Europeans before their dispersion, and the greatest of those "heavenly" beings must have been he who was heaven itself-Div (nom. Dyâus, gen. Divás). He is addressed in the Vedic hymns as Dyaush pitâ, i. e., Heaven Father, and his wife is Mâtâ Prithivi, Mother Earth. He is the Zeus Pater of the Greeks, the Jupiter of the Romans,* the German Tius, Norse Tyr. Dyaush pitâ was the god of the blue firmament, but even in the Vedic times his grandeur was already on the wane. Indra, the new lord of the firmament, had left him little more than a titular sovereignty in his own domain, whilst Varuna, another heavenly monarch, who was still in the plenitude of his power, commanded more respect than the roi fainéant, his neighbour. The all-covering Varuna,* the Uranos of the Greeks, was lord of the celestial sea and of the realm of light above it, that highest heaven in which the Fathers dwelt with their king Yama. After the southern branch of the Aryans had entered India, Varuna was brought down from the upper regions, to be thenceforth the god of the earthly sea, which had

+ Varuna and the demon Vritri both derive their names from var,

vri, to cover, enfold.

THE CHARIOT OF THE SUN.

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then for the first time become known to his votaries.

Whilst the sun was still a wheel, a store of gold, a swan or a flamingo, an eagle, falcon, horse, and many other things, it was also the eye of Varuna; just as among the Anglo-Saxons and other Germans it was held to be the eye of Woden. Varuna and Mithra (the friend), the god of daylight, used to sit together at morning on a golden throne, and journey at evening in a brazen car. At the same time there was a special god of the sun, Savitar or Sûrya, who also had his beaming chariot, drawn by two, seven, or ten red or golden coloured mares, called Haritas, a name in which Professor Max Müller has recognised the original of the Greek Charites.* The ideas of the horse-sun and the wheel-sun had naturally coalesced to form the chariot, and then the divine charioteer followed as a matter of course. The utter inconsistency of all these various representations of the same visible object did not give the Vedic hymnists the least concern. They took their materials as they found them in the floating speech and unmethodised conceptions of their people, and used them with the freedom of an imagination which had never been taught to run in critical

"Oxford Essays, " 1856, p. 81.

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A MULTIPLICITY OF SUNS.

harness. It is difficult at this day for men whose hereditary ideas of nature and its phenomena are such as the long growth of science has made themit is difficult for minds thus trained and furnished to go back to the point of view from which the primitive Aryans looked upon a world wherein they had everything to learn for themselves. To them it was by no means self-evident that the sun which shone upon them to-day was the same they had seen yesterday or the day before; on the contrary it seemed to them quite as reasonable to suppose that every new day had its new sun. The Greek mythology shows us a whole people of suns* in the Cyclops, giants with one eye, round as a wheel, in their foreheads. They were akin to the heavenly giants and dwelt with the Phæacians, the navigators of the cloud-sea, in the broad Hypereia,† the upperland, i. e., heaven, until the legend transplanted them both to the western horizon.

The morning twilight is represented in the Vedas by twin gods, and the ruddy dawn by the goddess Ushas, who is one in name and fact with the Greek Eôs. Her light was conceived to be a herd of red cows, and she herself figures in some hymns as a

* W. Grimm, "Die Sage von Polyphem." p. 27 ff.

+ Homer, Od. vii. 58, 206,

quail.

THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH.

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Vartikâ, the Sanscrit name of the bird, corresponds etymologically with ortyx, its Greek name; and in the myths of Greece and Asia Minor the quail is a symbol of light or heat. Instead of one Ushas, a plurality is sometimes mentioned, and indeed there was no end of them, since every new dawn appeared to be a new goddess.

The twin brothers who chase away the demons of the night and bring on the morning, are the Asvins, or Riders. There are points of resemblance between them and the twin sons of Leda which may be more than casual. They are extolled for having rescued many men from danger, and particularly for the aid they frequently afforded to storm-beaten sailors, whom they carried safely to shore in their chariot, or on the backs of their horses. They were bounteous givers, too, of wealth, food, and divine remedies for the ills that flesh is heir to. The wife of Cyavana, the son of Bhrigu, with whom they were in love, induced them by stratagem to renew her husband's youth, and this they effected by bathing him in a lake, from which the bather emerges with whatever age he pleases. Here we have for the first time that "fountain of youth" which reappears, after so long a period of apparent oblivion, in the poems of the middle ages. The renovating lake is the cloud water

D

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SOMA.

AMRITA.

AMBROSIA.

which contains the drink of immortality, the amrita of the Vedas, the ambrosia of the Greeks.

This heavenly beverage was brought down to earth and bestowed on mortals by the god Soma, the personification of the soma plant, which the Hindus now identify with the Asclepias acida, or Sarcostemma viminale. This is a plant containing a milky juice of a sweetish subacid flavour, which, being mixed with honey and other ingredients, yielded to the enraptured Aryans the first fermented liquor their race had ever known. The poetic fire with which Burns sings the praises of John Barleycorn may help us, but only in a faint degree, to comprehend the tumult of delight and wonder, the devout ecstasy, with which the first draught of the miraculous soma possessed the souls of a simple race of water-drinking nomades. What a Vedic hymn would Burns have raised had he been one of them! But there was not wanting many a sacred poet to commemorate the glorious event, nor did it fail to be hallowed in the traditions of succeeding generations from the Ganges to the Atlantic. Among all the Indo-Europeans it gave rise to a multitude of myths and legends, having for their subject the simultaneous descent of fire, of the soul of man, and of the drink of the gods. One of the synonymes of soma is