Our main source of information about the Indo-Aryans is the Rig Veda. ‘Veda’ means knowledge of superhuman powers that are active in the world and of the ways to influence them. That knowledge was believed to have existed in the world forever and then, long ago, it was ‘seen’ by sages in states of visionary ecstasy; they had insights into the hidden origins and interconnections of things visible in the world. These insights gave them magical techniques and rules for collaborating with higher powers. The Rig Veda was, then, the one repository of eternal truth.
The hymns collected in the Rig Veda served the tribes as a whole, but mainly catered to the intellectual elite and ensured their continuing dominance. The worldview of the Rig Veda knows nothing of the ideas that came to dominate India later; things such as vast cycles of time, individuals reincarnating thousands of times, and so forth.
The Vedic Indians took it for granted that the ordered cosmos would not change; it was always imperfect and constantly threatened by the forces of chaos, but it would nevertheless survive indefinitely. At the same time, they also thought that the cosmos had not always existed, but had been established at a certain moment in the past.
The Indo-Aryan cosmos existed and continued thanks to the principle of rita. Rita was, more or less, the order of nature, ‘how things were done correctly,’ similar to the Egyptian ma’at. Speech that was in accord with rita was truthful speech. Offenses against rita were murder, cursing, deceit, drunkenness, anger, gambling, cheating, etc. Each person had a particular function in society according to rita, and one was expected to devote oneself to fulfilling that place and its tasks.
The god that was mainly concerned with the maintenance of rita was Varuna. Varuna was not a warrior god; he was remote and imperturbable and dwelt in the great ocean that surrounded the cosmos and from which the cosmos had emerged. Varuna enveloped all things. He watched over the cosmos and rita from a distance. It was thanks to his power that heaven and Earth stood firm and immovable; his will was the source of all law and morality. Varuna had spies everywhere and any offence against rita was punished. Mitra was Varuna’s close associate and was associated with fire. Varuna was static, Mitra was active. The word mitra meant ‘contract’ and represented the uniting of people in friendship and peace. The prototype was the great cosmic contract that reconciled opposites.
Human life and the processes of nature were both subject to the same order, rita, and thus, to the personification of the contract as a principle. Indra was the only god to rival Varuna in majesty and power. He is shown as being like Varuna, or assisting Varuna as the protector of rita. But he was a warrior god, which Varuna was not. In Vedic India, victory in war was a supreme affirmation of the divinely appointed order.
There are several accounts of how the god Indra mastered primordial chaos and brought the world into being. About a quarter of the hymns of the Rig Veda are dedicated to Indra. Originally Indra personified the brute power of Nature, especially the atmosphere. He was a Storm God, wielder of thunderbolts and bringer of rain. But he was also the divine warrior, a giant with mighty arms and hands, voracious mouth and prodigious appetite. He traveled in a golden chariot drawn by two dun-colored horses and his thousand-toothed thunderbolts never missed their mark.
The Indo-Aryan tribes had developed a warrior ethos, every able-bodied male was expected to bear arms, and the king was, above all, a warlord. As their tireless champion, Indra captured hostile towns and wiped out the inhabitants and gave their horses, cattle and goods to his own people. He was felt to be physically present in a battle and, together with his fair-skinned companions, would slay the dark men. Indra was also known as ‘he with a thousand testicles,’ meaning that he was possessed of boundless creative energy and vitality, which he always exercised for the benefit of human beings.
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As in many other mythologies, as they developed over time, the cosmogonic tale of Indra tells us that he was the youngest of the gods, called into being as a result of a war between good and evil – Adityas and Danavas. The details need not detain us except to note that the Indra myth is very much like the combat myths of other peoples. The parallels between Egyptian and Babylonian myths are striking: the gods are helpless in the face of a monstrous power, but then a storm god appears, younger, more courageous and cleverer than the other gods. The young god tackles the monster, defeats and slays it, and in recognition of his achievements, he is exalted over all (or nearly all) of the other gods. A similar myth was part of Scandinavian heritage; in one form or another, the myth flourished over vast areas of the ancient world.
The important point was that, again, the cosmic law, rita, was established and the other gods were set to work again in their proper stations. The takeaway was that the cosmos has always been threatened by chaos, and yet it always survives and always will. No end of the world is depicted, though the god’s war against the forces of chaos can never end.
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Like Soma, Agni, or fire, was both a phenomenon and a god. Cohn notes that fire was worshipped as devoutly by the Vedic Indians as by the proto-Indo-Iranians, so it must have been a god long before the splitting of the tribes. Agni was an intimate god, at home in the domestic hearth, protector of the family. In the sacrifice ritual, Agni was central. It was Agni who invited the gods to the meal and ‘passed’ the food to them, so to say, in the process of burning; as the fire consumed the offerings, so did the gods consume them
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The god Rudra stood apart; he was the god of uncultivated land, the wilderness, and the frightening aspects of nature. He was at home with wild animals and serpents and was the patron of thieves and robbers; he brought sickness and death to humans and cattle. He was a god of the boundaries, so to say, not wholly belonging to the ordered world, but not alien either.
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Demons, on the other hand, were forever striving to overthrow the gods and had to weaken rita to do so. There was no limit to their nefarious activities. They prowled the land, brought sickness and death, entered into their victims and ate them up from the inside. Sorcerers could employ demons and could, themselves, become a sort of demon; whole categories of humans could be regarded as demonic, as was the case with the Dasas, the dark-skinned people who occupied northern India when the Indo-Aryans arrived.
-- Laura Knight-Jadczyk, From Paul to Mark
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