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ORIGIN OF BRAHMIN GOTRAS
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Rgveda had a living tradition in which maternity could be joint and paternity quite unimportant. It is for this reason that Tvästra's severed heads could give names to Brahmin gotras, for they must actually represent matriarchal gentes to begin with. It is not the mother-goddess who has three faces, like Hecate or Artemis among the Grecks, but the son born of three mother goddesses. Just what ancient chain connects our myth to the story of Herakles killing the three-headed Geryon, capturing Kerberos, or decapitating the Hydra we cannot consider here, for we have not as yet enough glyptic evidence from the Indus and Mesopotamian regions.
This can be rounded out by other myths, usually dismissed as trivial but which can now be seen to form connective tissue in the body of vedic mythology. Indra drank the soma by force in Tvastr's house (iii.48.4;iv.18.3) thus presumably thrusting himself upon Tvastr's tribe, or depriving him of power, or both. It is thought by some that the father whom Indra took by the foot and smashed (iv.18.12) is Tvastr himself, but this is highly improbable. Indra's father is nowhere. named, (nor is Indra reported anywhere as asaulting Tvastr) and his mother is doubtful too, though he is enrolled among the growing list of adityas, sons of Aditi. The later aditya par excellence is the sun, while the first is Varuna; both Tvaştṛ and Indra occur in a continously expanding list, and it is not clear that Aditi was a pre-Aryan mother-goddess, being once even cited in the masculine gender. The later Pañcavimsa Brāhmana (xii.5.18-22) reports that Indra suffered from cyc-discasc after killing Vṛtra, and was lulled to sleep by the daughters of Tvastr. These daughters generate fugitive Indra from the cows in which he had hidden himself; parallel versions show that the cows themselves are the daughters of Tvastr, so that the whole story is perhaps one of rebirth from several mothers, i.c. adoption. One may note that Durga is called Tväṣṭi(for Tväṣṭri) in the still later Devipurāņa, and a living cult of Tvastr(or his son ?) scems indicated only by the Paraskara Grhya-sutra ii.15.5. The adoption of Indra by the daughters of his predecessor is meaningless by patriarchal standards; cither Tvastr or his son would have had to adopt the war-god for its validity. What we do see is that not only did Aryans adopt some pre-Aryan Indic gods but assimilation in the opposite direction was also attempted. As for the three heads of Tryambaka becoming three eyes, we have a distant parallel in the Tväṣṭra story. Sat. Brah. iii.1.3.12-17 says that a special eye-ointment from mount Trikakud must be used.Trikakud means with three peaks, points (or even heads). The mountain was the transformation of Vṛtra's eye after that demon had been killed by Indra; but Vṛtra was the demon created by Tvastṛ to avenge his sons's murder by Indra. So the cycle is complete. The variant details of this and other similar narratives show that some background story ich could not be forgotten was adopted by several different people at various times for vcdic purposes; the principle is the same as that of the starred reading in textcriticism, on a different level. It is at least plausible that this faded craftsman
