Vedic mythology

28 III. RELIGION, WELTL. WISSENSCH. u. KUNST. i A. VEDIC MYTHOLOGY.
heights of heaven, who gathers the clouds, who wields the thunderbolt, and
whose will is law.
The phenomena with which the two greatest gods
of the RV. were
originally connected, largely accounts for the difference in their personality.
Varuna as concerned with the regularly recurring phenomena of celestial light,
is the supreme upholder of law in the moral as well as the physical world. His
character as such afforded no scope for the development of myths. Indra
as the god fighting in the strife of the Vedic Indian as a
elements, was conceived by the militant
sovereign of the warrior type. Owing to his close con
nexion with the meteorological phenomena of the thunderstorm, which are so
irregular in time and diversified in feature, the character of Indra on the one
hand shows traits of capriciousness, while on the other he becomes the centre
of more myths than any other deity of the RV. The theory of ROTH as to
the supersession of Varuna by Indra in the Rigvedic period, is dealt with
below ( 22).
the
With the growth of the conception of Prajapati ( 39) as a supreme deity,
characteristics of Varuna as a sovereign god naturally faded away, and
the dominion of the waters, only a part of his original sphere, alone remained
to him. Thus he ultimately became in post-Vedic mythology an Indian
Neptune, god
of the Sea.
The hypothesis recently advanced by OLDENBERG IS that Varuna primarily
represented the moon, cannot be passed over here. Starting from the assertion
that the characteristic number of the Adityas was seven and that their identity
with the Amesaspentas of the Avesta is an assured fact, he believes that
Varuna and Mitra were the moon and sun, the lesser Adityas representing
the five planets, and that they were not Indo-European deities, but were
borrowed during the Indo-Iranian period from a Semitic people more skilled
in astronomy than the Aryans. The character of Varuna when borrowed
must further have lost much of its original significance and have already
possessed a highly ethical aspect. For otherwise a distinctly lunar deity could
hardly have thrown Mitra, who was clearly understood to be the sun, into
the shade in the Indo-Iranian period, or have developed so highly abstract
a character as to account for the supreme position, as a moral ruler, of Ahura
Mazda in the Avesta and of Varuna in the Veda. This hypothesis does not
seem to account at all well for the actual characteristics of Varuna in the RV.
It also requires the absolute rejection of any connection between Varuna and
It has already been mentioned that Varuna goes back to the Indo-Iranian
period ( 5), for the Ahura Mazda of the Avesta 20
agrees with him in character
though not in name. The name of Varuna may even be Indo-European.
At least, the long accepted identification of the word with the Greek oopavoc,
though presenting phonetic difficulties, has not been rejected by some recent
authorities on 21
.
comparative philology
But whether the word is Indo-European or the formation of a later
period 22
it is , probably derived from the root var, to cover 23 , thus meaning
the . encompasser Sayana (on RV. i, 89^) connects it with this root in the
sense of enveloping or confining the wicked with his bonds 24 or commen
,
ting on TS. i, 8, i6 x
, in that of enveloping like darkness (cp. TS. 2, i, 7*).
If the word is Indo-European, it may have been an attribute of dyaus, the
ordinary name of sky , later becoming the regular appellative of sky in Greece,
but an exalted god of the sky in India 2 ^.
1 WEBER, ZDMG. 9, 242; 18, 268. 2 QRV. 286, n. 2, 3 Cp. ROTH,
ZDMG. 6, 72; EGGERS, Mitra 547; OLDENBERG, ZDMG. 50,48. -- 4 OST. 5,60,