Note 1 — Chapter VII · Barrenness.

In their adoration of rain-giving Indra as also a solar majesty, the ancient Hindus seem to have been fully aware of his inconsistent habits. ‘Thy inebriety is most intense,’ exclaims the eulogist, and soothingly adds, ‘Thou desirest that both thy inebriety and thy beneficence should be the means of destroying enemies and distributing riches.’1 Against famine is invoked the thunderbolt of Indra, and it is likened to the terrible Tvashtri, in whose fearful shape (pure fire) Agni once appeared to the terror of gods and men.2 This Tvashtri was not an evil being himself, but, as we have seen, an artificer for the gods similar to Vulcan; he was, however, father of a three-headed monster who has been identified with Vritra. Though these early worshippers recognised that their chief trouble was connected with ‘glaring heat’ (which Tvashtri seems to mean in the passage just referred to), Indra’s celebrants beheld him superseding his father Dyaus, and reigning in the day’s splendour as well as in the cloud’s bounty. This monopolist of parts in their theogony anticipated Jupiter Pluvius. Vedic mythology is pervaded with stories of the demons that arrested the rain and stole the cloud-cows of Indra—shutting them away in caves,—and the god is endlessly praised for dealing death to such. He slays Vritra, the ‘rain-arresting,’ and Dribhika, Bala, Urana, Arbuda, ‘devouring Swasna,’ ‘unabsorbable Súshna,’ Pipru, Namuchi, Rudhikrá, Varchin and his hundred thousand descendants;3 the deadly strangling serpent Ahi, especial type of Drouth as it dries up rivers; and through all these combats with the alleged authors of the recurring Barrenness and Famine, as most of these monsters were, the seat of the evil was the Sun-god’s adorable self!