boons. They nourish Agni and they bear away defilement and purify; they bestow remedies and grant long life. They are often associated with honey, and it may be that they were sometimes regarded as having the soma within them.
Though Rudra, the prototype of Śiva, is celebrated in only three hymns of the Ṛgveda, he already bears remarkable traits. He wears braided hair, like Pūṣan; his lips are beautiful, and his colour is brown. His car dazzles, and he wears a wonderful necklace. He holds the thunderbolt and bears bow and arrows; and his lightning-shaft shot from the sky traverses the earth. He generated the Maruts from Pṛśni, and himself bears the name Tryambaka (VII. lix. 12), denoting his descent from three mothers, presumably a reference to the triple division of the universe. He is fierce and strong, a ruler of the world, the great Asura of heaven, bountiful, easily invoked and auspicious, but this latter epithet, Śiva,[1] is not yet attached to him as his own.
None the less, Rudra is a very terrible deity and one whose anger is to be deprecated, whence he is implored not to slay or injure in his wrath the worshippers, their parents, men, children, cattle, or horses. His ill will is deprecated, and his favour is sought for the walking food, and he is even called man-slaying. On the other hand, he has healing powers and a thousand remedies; he is asked to remove sickness and disease; and he has a special remedy called jalāṣa, which may be the rain. This side of his nature is as essential as the other and lends plausibility to the view that he is the lightning, regarded mainly as a destroying and terrible agency, but at the same time as the power by which there is healing calm after storm and as propitious in that the lightning spares as well as strikes. Yet his nature has also been held to be a compound of a god of fire and a god of wind, his name denoting "the Howler" (from rud, "to cry"), as the chief of the spirits of the dead who storm along in the wind, and as a god of forest and mountain whence diseases speed to men.
- ↑ The word śiva means "auspicious."
