DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

4.2] OLD ARYAN GODS 87
The novice went to some forest retreat to learn from a particular teacher.
For a period of twelve years or more, he tended the guru’s cattle,
gathered (but never produced) food for him, while the teacher
imparted knowledge of the scriptures. The first step was to learn to
recite the sacred work, syllable by syllable, without a single mistake.
The meaning was taught thrpugh long discourses, but the pupil had
first to carry the entire text in his head. This gave the priests a monopoly
of the book deliberately kept unwritten (as with the Druids in Caesar’s
Gaul). It gave the priests a matchless prestige among the people, a
solidarity in action. Briefly, it made them into a class and a powerful
one which influenced later Indian history. The Aryans appear as a
patriarchal people : the gods are overwhelmingly male, the read god
being Agni the sacred fire (as with the Iranians), with personified gods
led by a good Aryan chief, Indra. Invincible in battle, with his weapon
the crushing vajra (a mace, later ‘thunderbolt’), he fights from a
swift chariot, gets drunk on the still unidentified, sacred heady soma
(Iranian haama) wine, shatters cities and dams, frees the rivers and
makes water available to his people; incessantly robs the stores (nidhi)
of the godless enemies, against whom he uses guile as well as force. A god
he superseded was Varuna, the Greek ouranos, a sky deity of more
benign aspect but able to strike mortals down with some disease in
punishment. Goddesses are very few, most prominent among them
Ila who seems merely the personified libation. Usas the dawn-goddess
(who is philologically equated to the Homeric Eds but is far more
important here, nearer to the Mesopotamia!! Ishtar) continued to be
worshipped even after losing a conflict with Indra. The gods are not
married, a female consort appears very rarely ; the gods’ wives are
called gnas collectively, with very little to do. Presumably, this
reflects the absence of regular pairing or of mariage to an individual
in Aryan society of the time and place. There is an old craftsman-god
Tvastr, unknown outside India, who appears at times as the creator,
a concept which was not needed in primitive times when what was
manufactured was of far less importance to man than what came from the
fertile mother-goddess, the earth. I have shown elsewhere 4
that this