e troop of Maruts, or
storm-gods, slew the monster with his bolt and set free the waters, or
recovered the hidden kine. Our poets sing endless variations on this
theme, and sometimes speak of Indra repeating the exploit for the
benefit of his worshippers, which is as much as to say that they, or
at least some of them, think it an allegory.

In all this maze of savage fancy and priestly invention and wild
exaggeration there are some points that stand out clearly. Indra is a
god of the people, particularly of the fighting man, a glorified type
of the fair-haired, hard-fighting, hard-drinking forefathers of the
Indian Aryans and their distant cousins the Hellenes; and therefore he
is the champion of their armies in battles. He is not a fiction of
hieratic imagination, whom priests regale with hyperbolic flattery
qualified only by the lukewarmness of their belief in their own words.
He is a living personality in the faith of the people; the priests
only invent words to express the people's faith, and perhaps add to
the old legends some riddling fancies of their own. Many times they
tell us that after conquering Vritra and setting free the waters or
the kine Indra created the light, the dawn, or the sun; or they say
that he produced them without mentioning any fight with Vritra;
sometimes they speak of him as setting free "the kine of the Morning,"
which means that they understood the cows to signify the light of
morning, and it would seem also that they thought that the waters
mentioned in the story signified the rain. But why do they speak of
these acts as heroic deeds, exploits of a mighty warrior, in the same
tone and with the same epic fire as when they sing of Indra's battles
in times near to their own, real battles in which their own
forefathers, strong in their faith in the god, shattered the armies of
hostile Aryan tribes or the fortresses of dark-skinned natives? The
personality of Indra and the spirit in which his deeds are recounted
remind us of hero-sagas; the allegories which the poets read into them
are on the other hand quite in the style of the priest. How can we
explain the presence of these two voices? Besides, why should the
setting free of the rain or the daylight be a peculiarly heroic
attribute of Indra? Other gods are said to do the same things as part
of their regular duties: Parjanya, Mitra and Varuna, Dyaus, dispense
the rain, others the light.

The explanation is simple. Indra, it seems to me, i