Celtic Mythology and Religion

THE ARYAN NATION. 35,
up under the one higher abstraction of monotheism."
But this quotation anticipates the history of Aryan
Mythology in the descendant nations. Aryan
religion itself was a fully developed henotheism, or
rather a polytheism, where the Supreme Deity was
different at different times in the eyes of the same
worshipper. At one time, to take the Vedic hymns
as representative of the oldest and nearest stratum
of religious thought to the Aryan religion, Indra
is
the only god whom the singer recognises, and he
exhausts his religious vocabulary on his praise alone ;
and at another time Varuna receives all worship,
at another it is Agni.
Indra represents the heavengod,
more especially in the view of a rain-giving deity,
for the root is the same as the English water, and
is seen also in the sacred River Indus. Agni is the
god of fire ; Varuna, of the canopy of heaven—the
Greek Uranus. Comparing and analysing the elements
of Teutonic, Greek, and Hindu Mythology,
for example, we may arrive at a tolerably clear
conception of the Aryan pantheon and religious
cultus. It would seem the chief deity was connected
with the worship of light ; the shining canopy
of heaven was the head of the Aryan Olympus.
The Gaelic word dia (and diu day) ; Sanscrit, Dyaus ;
Greek, Zeus ; Latin, deus and /w-piter ; and
English, Tiw (as seen in Tuesday) , are from the
primitive name of this god, their common root being
div, shining. Hence dia originally meant the bright