548 MR J. MUIR ON THE PRINCIPAL DEITIES OF THE RIGVEDA. 



perceptible in the older than in the more recent literary productions of the several 

 peoples. And such, in point of fact, turns out to be the case. The mythology of 

 the Veda does exhibit in some points a certain similarity to that of Homer and 

 Hesiod, and the mutual resemblance between the religious ideas of those ancient 

 works is, upon the whole, greater than that existing between the later Indian and 

 the later Greek pantheons. I say that, upon the whole, the older Indian mytho- 

 logy coincides more nearly with the Greek than the later Indian mythology 

 does. But, on the other hand, the later Indian system presents some points of 

 resemblance with the Greek which the Vedic system does not exhibit. I allude 

 to the fact that we find in the Indian epic poems and Puranas a god of the sea, a 

 god of war, and a goddess of love, who are unknown to the oldest parts of the 

 Veda, and yet correspond in a general way to the Poseidon, the Ares, and the 

 Aphrodite of the Greeks. Personifications of this sort may, however, be either 

 the product of an early instinct which leads men to create divine representatives 

 and superintendents of every department of nature, as well as of human life and 

 action ; or they may arise in part from a later process of reflection which conducts 

 to the same result, and from a love of systematic completeness which impels a 

 people to fill up any blanks in their earlier mythology, and to be always adding 

 to and modifying it. Resemblances of this last description, though they are by 

 no means accidental, are not necessarily anything more than the results of similar 

 processes going on in nations possessing the same general tendencies and char- 

 acteristics. But the older points of coincidence between the religious ideas of the 

 Greeks and the Indians, to which reference was first made, are of a different 

 character, and are the undoubted remains of an original mythology which was 

 common to the ancestors of both races. This is shown by the fact that, in the 

 cases to which I allude, it is not only the functions, but the names, of the gods 

 which correspond in both literatures. 



But the value of the Vedic mythology to the general scholar does not consist 

 merely in the circumstance that a few religious conceptions, and the names of 

 two or three deities, are common to it with the Greek. It is even more important 

 to observe that the earliest monuments of Indian poetry, consisting, as they do, 

 almost exclusively of hymns in praise of the national deities, and being the pro- 

 ductions of an age far anterior to that of Homer and Hesiod, represent a more 

 ancient period of religious development than we discover in the Greek poets, and 

 disclose to us, in the earliest stages of formation, a variety of myths which 

 a few centuries later had assumed a fixed and recognised form* It is also to be 

 noticed that, from the copiousness of their materials, the hymns of the Rigveda 

 supply us with far more minute illustrations of the natural workings of the 

 human mind, in the period of its infancy, upon matters of rehgion than we can 



* See Professor Max Muller's essay on " Comparative Mythology," in the Oxford Essays for 

 1856, p. 47. 



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