fate. Yet there is mention of deep places produced for the evil, false, and untrue, and Indra and Soma are besought to dash the evil-doers into the abyss of bottomless darkness, while the prayer is uttered that the enemy and the robber may lie below the three earths. From these obscure beginnings probably arose the belief in hell which is expressed in clear terms in the Atharvaveda and which is later elaborated at length in the epic and in the Purāṇas.
But the fathers are more than spirits living in peace after the toils of life. They are powerful to aid and receive offering, while they are invoked with the dawns, streams, mountains, heaven and earth, Pūṣan, and the Ṛbhus. They are asked to accord riches, offspring, and long life; they are said to have generated the dawn and, with Soma, to have extended heaven and earth. They especially love the soma and come for it in thousands. Yet though they are even called gods, they are distinguished from the true divinities; their path is the Pitṛyāṇa, or "Way of the Fathers," as contrasted with the Devayāna, or "Way of the Gods"; and the food given to them is termed svadhā, in contrast with the call svāhā with which the gods are invited to take their portion. The fathers are described as lower, higher, and middle, and as late and early; and mention is made of the races of Navagvas, Vairūpas, Atharvans, Aṅgirases, Vasiṣṭhas, and Bhṛgus, the last four of which appear also in the Ṛgveda as priestly families.
In one passage of the Ṛgveda (X. xvi. 3) an idea occurs which has been thought to have served in some degree as stimulating the later conception of metempsychosis, of which there is no real trace in that Saṁhitā. It is there said, in the midst of verses providing for the dead being taken by Agni to the world above,
"The sun receive thine eye, the wind thy spirit; go, as thy merit is, to earth or heaven.
Go, if it be thy lot, unto the waters; go, make thine home in plants
with all thy members."[1]
- ↑ R. T. H. Griffith, Hymns of the Rigveda, iv. 133.
