race to the Aryan; he leads Turvaśa and Yadu over the rivers, apparently as patron of an Aryan migration. Moreover he assists his favourites against every foe; and his friend Sudās is aided in his battle with the ten kings, his foes being drowned in the Paruṣṇī. To his worshippers he is a wall of defence, a father, mother, or brother. He bestows wealth on the pious man, and, as with a hook a man showers fruit from a tree, so he can shower wealth on the righteous. He is the lord of riches and at the same time is "the Bountiful One," whence in later literature the epithet Maghavan becomes one of his names. He richly rewarded a maiden who, having found soma beside a river, pressed it with her teeth and dedicated it to him. Yet he has few moral traits in his character and is represented as boasting of his drinking feats. Indeed it is most significant that we have proof, even in the Vedic period, of men doubting his existence.
It is almost certain that in Indra we must see a storm-god, and that his exploit of defeating Vṛtra is a picture of the bursting forth of the rain from the clouds at the oncoming of the rainy season, when all the earth is parched, and when man and nature alike are eager for the breaking of the drought. The tremendous storms which mark the first fall of the rain are generally recognized as a most fitting source for the conception of the god, while the mountains cleft and the cows won are the clouds viewed from different standpoints. But Indra appears also as winning the sun, a trait representing the clearing away of the clouds from the sun after the thunder-storm, with which has been confused or united the idea of the recovery of the sun at dawn from the darkness of night. That some of the terminology reflects an earlier view that Vṛtra is the winter[1] which freezes the stream, and that Indra is the sun, is not proved, nor need we hold that the poets of the Ṛgveda really meant only that the god freed the rivers from the mountains and did not realize that the mountains were clouds, as even the commentators on the Ṛgveda knew.
- ↑ See A. Hillebrandt, Vedische Mythologie, iii. 157 ff.
