Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/182

act, which the plastic spirit of the Greeks shapes for all time into the main motif of the Prometheus tragedy, appears to the Vedic poets merely as heaven's method of furnishing fire and soma for the sacrifice: it does not turn into a real humanised myth. And what I have deduced here in detail is true of all of Agni's traits in the Veda; he is at one moment element and phenomenon, at another person and god, at all times as clear as his own light to teach the nature of the gods.

I have used the term transparent in connection with divine personifications whose naturalistic basis and whose starting point in human consciousness is absolutely clear. Now the term translucent, figure of speech though it is, I wish to be understood in its plain physical sense. It refers to mythic formations whose structural outline may still be traced with a great deal of truth, although it is obscured by incrustations of secondary matter. It is often merely the loss of the original simple name which is the cause of the obscuration. Divinities of the name "Dawn" (Ushas), "Sun" (Sūrya), or "Fire" (Agni), bring credentials that every one can read. But the quick substitution of an attractive, or pointed epithet for the original name may plague the investigator for all time to come, and deprive him of mathematical certainty, even though every instinct draws him in the