have in common as they are presented to us in a poetry which has gone so far as to recognize an essential unity among the multiplicity of the divine forms. "The bird—that is, the sun—which is but one, priest and poets with words make into many," we are told, and "Priests speak in diverse ways of that which is but one: they call it Agni, Yama, Mātariśvan." Yet this is not so much monotheism as pantheism, for we learn that Aditi is everything, gods and men, that which has been and that which shall be; and that Prajāpati ("Lord of Creatures") embraces all things within himself. From this point of view it is easy to understand the fact[1] that here and there one god is treated as if he were the highest god, or that one god can be identified with any of the others, and all the others be said to be centred in him. There is no real monotheistic strain in a declaration that "Agni alone, like Varuṇa, is lord of wealth." The same syncretism is seen in the constant addressing of prayers to groups of gods, in the stereotyping of the invocation of the gods in pairs, and in the reckoning of the gods as thirty-three, i.e. three sets of eleven each in the sky, the waters of the air, and the earth.
Normally, and subject to certain exceptions, the gods are conceived as anthropomorphic; they wear garments, carry weapons, and drive in cars. Yet their personality is very differently developed in the several cases: Indra is much more anthropomorphic than Agni, whose tongue and whose limbs merely denote his flames. The abode of the gods is in the highest realm of sky, and the offerings of men are either carried thither to them by Agni or, in a concept which is perhaps older, they are deemed to come to the straw on which the pious worshipper has set out his gifts. The food which they eat is that of man—milk, barley, butter, cattle, sheep, and goats—chosen now and then for special fitness, as when Indra, often called a bull, receives hecatombs of bulls. The drink of the gods is the soma.
Of feuds among the gods we hear little or nothing: Indra alone reveals traits of disorderliness, perhaps not unnatural in
- ↑ This is what F. Max Müller (Ancient Sanskrit Literature, London, 1859, pp. 526 ff.) called "henotheism."
