luence is
forthcoming, but the opinion of some scholars that the figure of Varuna
somehow reflects Semitic ideas is plausible. It has been suggested that
he was originally a lunar deity, which explains his association with
Mitra (the Persian Mithra) who was a sun god, and that the group of
deities called Adityas and including Mitra and Varuna were the sun, moon
and the five planets known to the ancients. This resembles the
Babylonian worship of the heavenly bodies and, though there is no record
whatever of how such ideas reached the Aryans, it is not difficult to
imagine that they may have come from Babylonia either to India[153] or
to the country where Indians and Iranians dwelt together. There is a
Semitic flavour too in the Indian legend of the Churning of the
Ocean[154]. The Gods and Asuras effect this by using a huge serpent as a
rope to whirl round a mountain and from the turmoil there arise various
marvellous personages and substances including the moon. This resembles
in tone if not in detail the Babylonian creation myths, telling of a
primaeval abyss of waters and a great serpent which is slain by the Gods
who use its body as the material for making the heavens and the
earth[155].

Yet Varuna is not the centre of a monotheistic religion any more than
Indra, and in later times he becomes a water god of no marked
importance. The Aryans and Semites, while both dissatisfied with
polytheism and seeking the one among the many, moved along different
paths and did not reach exactly the same goal. Semitic deities were
representations of the forces of nature in human form but their
character was stereotyped by images, at any rate in Assyria and
Babylonia, and by the ritual of particular places with which they were
identified. Semitic polytheism is mainly due to the number of tribes and
localities possessing separate deities, not to the number of deities
worshipped by each place and tribe. As villages and small towns were
subordinate to great towns, so the deities of minor localities were
subordinate to those of the greater. Hence the Semitic god was often
thought of as a king who might be surrounded by a court and then became
the head of a pantheon of inferior deities, but also might be thought of
as tolerating no rivals. This latter conception when combined with moral
earnestness gives us Jehovah, who resembles Varuna, except that Varuna
is neither jealous nor national. Indian polytheism also originated in
the personif