ly the same as the eagle
who in the Rigvedic legend carried off the soma for Indra, has been
pressed into his service; he now rides on Garuda, and bears his figure
upon his banner. I have already suggested a possible explanation of
this evolution (above, p. 41): owing to his close association with
Indra, the most truly popular of Rigvedic deities, the laic
imagination transfused some of the live blood of Indra into the veins
of the priestly abstraction Vishnu. To the plain man Indra was very
real; and as he frequently heard tales of Indra being aided in his
exploits by Vishnu, he came to regard Vishnu as a very present helper
in trouble. The friend of Indra became the friend of mankind. The post
of Indra had already been fixed for him by the theologians; but the
functions of Vishnu, outside the rituals, were still somewhat vaguely
defined, and were capable of considerable expansion. Here was a great
opportunity for those souls who were seeking for a supreme god of
grace, and were not satisfied to find him in Siva; and they made full
use of it, and wholly transformed the personality of Vishnu.

One of the stages in this transformation was the absorption of
Narayana in Vishnu. Narayana was originally a god of a different kind.
The earliest reference to him is in a Brahmana which calls him Purusha
Narayana, which means that it regards him as being the same as the
Universal Spirit which creates from itself the cosmos; it relates that
Purusha Narayana pervaded the whole of nature (SB. XII. iii. 4, 1),
and that he made himself omnipresent and supreme over all beings by
performing a _pancha-ratra sattra_, or series of sacrifices lasting
over five days (ib. XIII. vi. 1, 1). Somewhat later we find prayers
addressed to Narayana, Vasudeva, and Vishnu as three phases of the
same god (Taitt. Aran. X. i. 6). But was Narayana in origin merely a
variety of the Vedic Purusha or our old acquaintance Prajapati? His
name must give us pause. The most simple explanation of it is that it
is a family name: as Karshnayana means a member of the Krishna-family
and Ranayana a man belonging to the family of Rana, so Narayana would
naturally denote a person of the family of Nara. But Nara itself
signifies a _man_: is the etymology therefore reduced to absurdity?
Not at all: Nara is also used as a proper name, as we shall see.[21]
Probably the name really means what naturally it would seem to mean,
"a man of the Nara family"; that Narayana was origin