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The Vedas, Brāhmaṇas and their Philosophy [ch.
people as we find in the hymns were highly impressionable and fresh. At this stage the time was not ripe enough for them to accord a consistent and well-defined existence to the multitude of gods nor to universalize them in a monotheistic creed. They hypostatized unconsciously any force of nature that overawed them or filled them with gratefulness and joy by its beneficent or aesthetic character, and adored it. The deity which moved the devotion or admiration of their mind was the most supreme for the time. This peculiar trait of the Vedic hymns Max Müller has called Henotheismor Kathenotheism:"a belief in singlegods, each in turn standing out as the highest. And since the gods are thought of as specially ruling in their own spheres, the singers, in their special concerns and desires, call most of all on that god to whom they ascribe the most power in the matter,--to whose department if I may say so, their wish belongs. This god alone is present to the mind of the suppliant; with him for the time being is associated everything that can be said of a divine being;—he is the highest, the only god, before whom all others disappear, there being in this, however, no offence or depreciation of any other god 1." "Against this theory it has been urged," as Macdonell rightly says in his Vedic Mythology?, “that Vedic deities are not represented 'as independent of all the rest,' since no religion brings its gods into more frequent and varied juxtaposition and combination, and that even the mightiest gods of the Veda are made dependent on others. Thus Varuna and Sūrya are subordinate to Indra (1. 101), Varuna and the Aśvins submit to the power of Vişnu (1. 156)....Even when a god is spoken of as unique or chief (eka), as is natural enough in laudations, such statements lose their temporarily monotheistic force, through the modifications or corrections supplied by the context or even by the same verses." "Henotheism is therefore an appearance,” says Macdonell,“ rather than a reality, an appearance produced by the indefiniteness due to undeveloped anthropomorphism, by the lack of any Vedic god occupying the position of a Zeus as the constant head of the pantheon, by the natural tendency of the priest or singer in extolling a particular god to exaggerate his greatness and to ignore other gods, and by the
i The Rigveda, by Kaegi, p. 27.
? See Ibid. p. 33. See also Arrowsmith's note on it for other references to Henotheism.
3 Macdonell's Vedic Mythology, pp. 16, 17.
