ts will say that Soma _is_ the moon; and
literature will then obediently accept this statement, and, gradually
forgetting nearly everything that Soma meant to the Rigvedic priests,
will use the name Soma merely as a secondary name for Chandra, the
moon and its god. A very illuminating process, which shows how a god
may utterly change his nature. Now we turn to the hero-gods.

Indra and the Asvina at the beginning came to be worshipped because
they were heroes, men who were supposed to have wrought marvellously
noble and valiant deeds in dim far-off days, saviours of the
afflicted, champions of the right, and who for this reason were
worshipped after death, perhaps even before death, as divine beings,
and gradually became associated in their legends and the forms of
their worship with all kinds of other gods. Times change, gods grow
old and fade away, but the remembrance of great deeds lives on in
strange wild legends, which, however much they may borrow from other
worships and however much they may be obscured by the phantom lights
of false fancy, still throw a glimmer of true light back through the
darkness of the ages into an immeasurably distant past.

Indra is a mighty giant, tawny of hair and beard and tawny of aspect.
The poets tell us that he bears up or stretches out earth and sky,
even that he has created heaven and earth. He is a monarch supreme
among the gods, the lord of all beings, immeasurable and irresistible
of power. He rides in a golden chariot drawn by two tawny horses, or
many horses, even as many as eleven hundred, and he bears as his chief
weapon the _vajra_, or thunderbolt, sometimes also a bow with arrows,
a hook, or a net. Of all drinkers of soma he is the lustiest; he
swills many lakes of it, and he eats mightily of the flesh of bulls
and buffaloes. To his worshippers he gives abundance of wealth and
happiness, and he leads them to victory over hostile tribes of Aryans
and the still more dreaded hordes of dark-skins, the Dasas and Dasyus.
He guided the princes Yadu and Turvasa across the rivers, he aided
Divodasa Atithigva to discomfit the dark-skinned Sambara, he gave to
Divodasa's son Sudas the victory over the armies of the ten allied
kings beside the river Parushni. Many are the names of the devils and
demons that have fallen before him; but most glorious of all his deeds
is the conquest of Vritra, the dragon dwelling in a mountain fastness
amidst the waters, where Indra, accompanied by th