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XL. — On the Principal Deities of the Rigveda* By J. Mum, Esq., 



D.C.L., LL D. 



(Read 7th March 1864.) 



In the paper which I had the honour to read before the Society last winter, I 

 stated the reasons, drawn from history and from comparative philology, which 

 exist for concluding that the Brahmanical Indians belong to the same race as the 

 Greek, the Latin, the Teutonic, and other nations of Europe. If this conclusion 

 be well-founded, it is evident that at the time when the several branches of the 

 great Indo-European family separated to commence their migrations in the 

 direction of their future homes, they must have possessed in common a large 

 stock of religious and mythological conceptions. This common mythology 

 would, in the natural course of events, and from the action of various causes, 

 undergo a gradual modification analogous to that undergone by the common 

 language which had originally been spoken by all these tribes during the period 

 of their union; and, in the one case as in the other, this modification would 

 assume in the different races a varying character, corresponding to the diversity 

 of the influences to which they were severally subjected. We shall not, there- 

 fore, be surprised to find that even the oldest existing mythology of the Indians 

 differs widely from the oldest known mythology of the Greeks, any more than 

 we are to find that the Sanskrit in its earliest surviving forms is a very different 

 language from the earliest extant Greek, since the Vedic hymns, the most primitive 

 remains of Sanskrit poetry, date from a period when the two kindred races had 

 been separated for perhaps above a thousand years, and the most ancient monu- 

 ments of Greek literature are still more recent. Yet, notwithstanding this long sepa- 

 ration, we might reasonably anticipate that some fragments of the primitive Indo- 

 European mythology should have remained common to both the eastern and the 

 western branches of the family; while, at the same time, we should, of course, 

 expect that such traces of common religious conceptions would be more distinctly 



* This essay contains the substance of a series of papers either already communicated, or in- 

 tended to be communicated, to the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, in which the 

 same subject is treated in greater detail, and with numerous references to the original passages of the 

 Rigveda. For further information on the gods of the Veda, reference may also be made to Profes- 

 sor H. H. Wilson's prefaces to the three volumes of his translation of the Rigveda ; to Professor 

 Rudolph Roth's papers, " Die Sage von Dschemschid," and " Die hbchsten Gbtter der Arischen 

 Vblker," in the Journal of the German Oriental Society, vols. iv. and vi. ; to the paper by the same 

 author " On the Morality of the Veda, " and the account of the " main Results of the later Vedic 

 Researches in Germany," by Professor Whitney, in the third volume of the Journal of the American 

 Oriental Society ; and to Professor Max Miiller's " Histoi-y of Ancient Sanskrit Literature," and his 

 "Essay on Compai-ative Mythology," in the Oxford Essays for 1856. The sketches of Rudra and 

 Vishnu given in this paper are abridged from the fuller accounts of those gods in my " Sanskrit 

 Texts," vol. iv. 



VOL. XXIII. PART II. 7 I 



