20 SIR M. MONIER WILLIAMS ON THE MONISM, PANTHEISM, AND 
in later Sanskrit the idea of plurality in Divinity. But what does 
Sunahgepha do? He commences with a short mysterious verse, 
‘* Whom shall I seek of all the Divinities? Who will restore us 
to Aditi (7.e., The Boundless One, The Infinite) that I may again 
see my father and my mother?” Rig-Veda, I, 24,1. This verse 
is said by the Vedic writers to have been addressed to Prajapati— 
i.e., The Lord of all Creatures ’’—and to Him he cries for restor- 
ation to Aditi, the One Lord of All, in whom he should be restored 
to father and mother. This remarkable verse, when construed with 
the expression preceding its utterance, reminds us of the word Elohim 
in Genesis, a name of the One Lord in plural form, and of masculine 
and feminine conjoint significance. Then I see right through the 
succeeding chain of hymns an agreement in the successive manifest- 
ations of the various “Devas” or deities. Sunahgepha having ad- 
dressed Prajapati, the Lord of Creation, Prajapati sends him to Agni, 
whom he addresses in substantially the same terms as Prajapati. 
Agni sends him to Savitar, a name afterwards applied to the Sun, 
Savitar sends him to Varuna—the Lord of Encircling Heaven—to 
whom he addresses two sublime hymns, unsurpassed save in Holy 
Scripture, for pure spirituality, and reverential, pathetic human 
supplication. Varuna promises deliverance, but sends him to Agni, 
in the hymns to whom the sacrificial idea is more developed, Agni 
being addressed as being both the offering and the priest who 
officiates. Agni sends him to the Visvedevas—or host of Devas—to 
whom he addresses a verse expressing veneration to all the Devas, 
“old and new,” with a prayer for pardon if he neglect any of them. 
The Visvedevas refer him to Indra, whose worship, as the special 
divinity of the Aryans as against their enemies, comes next. In 
the verses to Indra, and his manifestation to the poet’s imagin- 
ation, appear the first traces of anthropomorphic, and therefore 
plural, conceptions of Deity in this chain of hymns. In Indra also 
we reach the first idea of anything like a contest, but that contest 
(and this is the point I started with) is not between good and evil, 
but between Indra and Vritra, both as representations of Cosmic 
forces. Time would fail me to follow the legend and the chain 
of hymns further, or to do more than glance at Sunahgepha’s 
subsequent deliverance at the morning dawn (for a close com- 
parison of Vedic ritual has convinced me that the Vedic authors 
intended to represent him as crying out, while bound to the 
sacrificial post, from the waning hour of noontide—the ordinary 
sacrificial hour of the Mosaic ritual and of Vedic India also—all 
