sages, which are few in number, there are
thousands in which ever so many divine beings are praised and prayed
to. Even their number is sometimes given as "thrice eleven"[154] or
thirty-three, and one poet assigns eleven gods to the sky, eleven to
the earth, and eleven to the waters,[155] the waters here intended
being those of the atmosphere and the clouds. These thirty-three gods
have even wives apportioned to them,[156] though few of these only
have as yet attained to the honor of a name.[157]

These thirty-three gods, however, by no means include all the Vedic
gods, for such important deities as Agni, the fire, Soma, the rain,
the Maruts or Storm-gods, the A_s_vins, the gods of Morning and
Evening, the Waters, the Dawn, the Sun are mentioned separately; and
there are not wanting passages in which the poet is carried away into
exaggerations, till he proclaims the number of his gods to be, not
only thirty-three, but three thousand three hundred and
thirty-nine.[158]

If therefore there must be a name for the religion of the Rig-Veda,
polytheism would seem at first sight the most appropriate. Polytheism,
however, has assumed with us a meaning which renders it totally
inapplicable to the Vedic religion.

Our ideas of polytheism being chiefly derived from Greece and Rome, we
understand by it a certain more or less organized system of gods,
different in power and rank, and all subordinate to a supreme God, a
Zeus or Jupiter. The Vedic polytheism differs from the Greek and Roman
polytheism, and, I may add, likewise from the polytheism of the
Ural-Altaic, the Polynesian, the American, and most of the African
races, in the same manner as a confederacy of village communities
differs from a monarchy. There are traces of an earlier stage of
village-community life to be discovered in the later republican and
monarchical constitutions, and in the same manner nothing can be
clearer, particularly in Greece, than that the monarchy of Zeus was
preceded by what may be called the septarchy of several of the great
gods of Greece. The same remark applies to the mythology of the
Teutonic nations also.[159] In the Veda, however, the gods worshipped
as supreme by each sept stand still side by side. No one is first
always, no one is last always. Even gods of a decidedly inferior and
limited character assume occasionally in the eyes of a devoted poet a
supreme place above all other gods.[160] It was necessary, therefore,
for the purpose o