smiles on the small and the great. In short, it is impossible to mistake the meaning of the words addressed to her. We see that she is the dawn, and no mere personification of the morning light; but she is as completely a conscious being, moved by the emotions that may stir the human heart, as any woman whom the greatest of epic poets has immortalised in his song. She is bright, fair, and loving -the joy of all who behold her.

She shines upon us like a young wife, rousing every living being to go to his work.

'She rose up, spreading far and wide, and moving towards everyone. She grew in brightness, wearing her brilliant garment. The mother of the cows, the leader of the days, she shone gold-coloured, lovely to behold.

"She, the fortunate, who brings the eye of the god, who leads the white and lovely steed, the dawn was seen revealed by her rays. With brilliant treasures she follows everyone. Shine for us with thy best rays, thou bright dawn, thou who lengthenest our life, who givest us wealth in cows, horses, and chariots.' '

1

Still more exact in its description of the phenomena of the morning and the day is the hymn in which the worshipper addresses her as leading on the sun and going before him, preparing practicable paths and expanding everywhere.

'Lucidly white is she, occupying the two regions 2 and manifesting her power from the east; she traverses the path of the sun, as knowing his course, and harms not the quarters of the horizon.

Ushas, the daughter of heaven, tending to the west, puts forth her beauty. Bestowing precious treasures on the offerer of adoration, she, ever youthful, brings back the light as of old.'

anw, in Latin as uro.

The Lithuanian form is Ausera. (Peile, Introduction to

Greek and Latin Etymology, xii.)

1 R. V. vii. 77.

2 The upper and middle firmament.

This is not personification, nor is it allegory. It is simply the language of men who have not learnt to distinguish between subject and object, and in it we I. The Vedic have the key to expressions with which the Varuna. hymns of the Rig Veda are filled. Nor need we be surprised if in these hymns the phrases suggested by outward phenomena run into a meaning purely spiritual. This is especially the case with Varuna and Dyaus, the supreme gods of the earliest Vedic ages. The former is simply the heaven which serves to veil or cover Prithivî, the broad or flat earth, which is his bride,' and who in the Theogony of Hesiod reappears as Gaia. As such, Varuna is a creation of mythical speech, and is embodied in visible form. He sits on his throne, clothed in golden armour, and dwells in a palace supported on a thousand columns, while his messengers stand round to do his bidding. But in many of the hymns we also find language which is perpetually suggesting the idea of an unseen and almighty Being, who has made all things and upholds them by his will. In these hymns Varuna dwells in all worlds as sovereign. The wind is his breath. It is he who has placed the sun in the heavens, and who guides the stars in their courses. He has hollowed out the channels of the rivers, and so wisely ordered things that, though all the rivers pour their waters into the sea, the sea is never filled. He has a thousand eyes: he knows the flight of birds in the sky, the paths of the ships on the seas, and the course of the far-sweeping wind. Such language may pass easily into that of the purest worship of the One Maker and Father of all men; and thus we have the prayer :

'Let me not yet, O Varuna, enter into the house of clay; have mercy, Almighty, have mercy.

1 The name Varuna corresponds to the Greek Ouranos, and is built up on the same root which gives the names of the Hindu Vritra, the veiling demon of darkness, the Greek Orthros, who with Kerberos (Cerberus), the Vedic Çarvara, guards the gates of Hades. Prithivî transliterated into Greek becomes Plateia, our flat.

'If I go along trembling like a cloud driven by the wind, have mercy, Almighty, have mercy.

Through want of strength have I gone to the wrong shore; have mercy, Almighty, have mercy.

'Whenever we men, O Varuna, commit an offence. before thy heavenly host, whenever we break thy law through thoughtlessness, have mercy, Almighty, have mercy.'

But although the name of Varuna has a common element with that of Vritra, the dark enemy of Indra, there is no likeness of character between them. Varuna is armed, indeed, with destructive nooses; but these are prepared for the wicked only. They ensnare the men who speak lies, passing by the man who speaks truth. He holds the unrighteous fast in prison, but he does so only as the punisher of iniquity, which cannot be hidden from him who 'numbers the winkings of men's eyes,' and not as the gloomy Hades of the nether world.

The true greatness of Varuna belongs seemingly to one of the earliest stages of Hindu thought. In Greece he II. Dyaus. reappears as Ouranos; but as there Zeus became the name of the supreme God, Ouranos lost his importance, and almost faded out of sight. The same fate befell Varuna, who gave way first to the correlative of Zeus, the Vedic Dyaus, the god not of the veiling or nightly heaven, but of the bright and gleaming canopy of the day. The name is widely spread among the Aryan tribes. It reappears not only in the Greek Zeus (Zen-os), but in the Latin Juno, answering to a form Zenon, in Diana, Dianus, Janus, and many more. In Teutonic dialects we find it in the form Tiu, the God of light, a name still familiar to us in Tivsdag, or Tuesday. Dyaus was invoked commonly as DyausPitar, the Zeus Pater, or father Zeus of the Greeks, the Jupiter of the Latins. But although some mythical features entered gradually into the conceptions of this deity, the word retained its original meaning far too clearly to allow,

DYAUS. MITRA. INDRA.

33

it to hold its ground in Hindu mythology. Dyaus, therefore, gave way to his child Indra, who, in a land which under its scorching sun depends wholly on the bounty of the benignant rain-god, was worshipped as the fertiliser of the earth, and was naturally regarded as more powerful than his father. But although his greatness is obscured by that of his son, he still wields the thunderbolt, and is spoken of as the father of the Dawn, who is invincible by all but Indra.

In Mitra, the brother of Varuna, we have another god of the heaven, who, like Dyaus, represents the firmament of noontide. Thus the two represent the phases III, Mitra. which pass over the sky by night and by day. Hence it is not strange that in the Zendavesta Mithras should occupy a place between the two powers of light and darkness, of good and evil.

In Indra we have the god whose special office it is to do battle with the demon of drought, and let loose the lifegiving waters. He is the son of Dyaus, the IV. Indra. gleaming heaven, and he is seen in the dazzling orb which seems to smite the thunder clouds, and compel them to give up their prey. His golden locks flow over his shoulders, and his unerring arrows have a hundred points and are winged with a thousand feathers. In his hand he holds a golden whip, and he is borne across the heaven in a flaming chariot drawn by the tawny or glistening steeds called the Harits. His beard flashes like lightning, and as his eye pierces to every part of the universe, he is possessed of an inscrutable and unfathomable wisdom. As the bringer of the rain, and therefore also of the harvest, he is the god whose power is most earnestly invoked by his Hindu worshippers; but no purely spiritual prayer, such as those which were offered to Varuna, was ever addressed to him. The only work for which he was supposed to exist was to

The name Indra, which is that of the great stream Indus, denotes moisture or sap.

D

do battle with, and to conquer, the demons who were in revolt against him. The chief of these demons is Vritra, the hiding thief; Ahi,' the strangling snake; or Pani, the marauder. But he is also known as Namuki, the Greek Amykos, as Sushna, Sambara, Bala, Chumuri. The victory of Indra over these rebels brings plenty of corn, wine, oil; but there is nothing moral or spiritual in the struggle. He is the rescuer of the cows (the clouds), whose milk is to refresh the earth, and which have been hidden away in the caves of the robbers. As driving these before him he is Parjanya, the rain-bringer; and the poet says: 'The winds blow strong, the lightnings flash, the plants spring up, the firmament dissolves. Earth becomes fit for all creatures when Parjanya fertilises the soil with showers.' 2

The name Brahma is associated with a much later stage of Hindu thought; but it denoted at first simply the selfV. Brahma. existent being, whose mythical acts are susceptible of a spiritual interpretation, and are so interpreted in all the Hindu comments on the sacred literature of the country. As in the Orphic Theogony, the generation of Brahma begins with the great mundane egg; but in it Brahma produces himself, and becomes the progenitor of all creatures. Along with Vishnu and Siva, he forms a later Hindu Trimurtti or trinity, being himself the creator, while Vishnu is the preserver, and Siva the destroyer. The older trinity had consisted of Agni, Vayu, and Surya—the fire, the air, and the sun. The name Mahâdeva, great god (Greek, Megas Theos), is applied to all these deities and to many others; but it was especially used in speaking of the destroyer Siva—to destroy, according to Indian philosophy, being only to reproduce under another form.

The evidence already before us shows that in the most Ahi reappears in the Greek Echis, Echidna, the dragon which crushes its victim with its coil. It is, in short, anything that chokes, whether as Anhas, sin, or the Latin angor, anguish.

2 The name Indra is sometimes used as a physical equivalent of Dyaus, the heaven, the clouds being said to move in Indra, as the Maruts, or winds, are described as coursing through Dyaus.