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8. COSMOGONY. 13 as it accounts for the formation of the world from the body of a giant. With him the gods performed a sacrifice, when his head became the sky, his navel the air, and his feet the earth. From his mind sprang the moon, from his eye the sun, from his mouth Indra and Agni, from his breath, wind. The four castes also arose from him. His mouth became the brāhmaṇa, his arms the rajanya or warrior, his thighs the vaisya, and his feet the sudra. The interpretation given in the hymn itself is pantheistic, for it is there said (v. 2) that Puruşa is 'all this, both what has become and what shall be'. In the AV. (10, 17) and the Upanisads (Mund. Up. 2, 110) Puruşa is also pantheistically interpreted as identical with the universe. He is also identified with Brahma (Chand. Up. 1, 75). In the SB. (11, 1, 6¹) he is the same as Prajapati, the creator. There are in the last book of the RV. some hymns which treat the origin of the world philosophically rather than mythologically. Various passages show that in the cosmological speculation of the RV. the sun was regarded as an important agent of generation. Thus he is called the soul (ātmā) of all that moves and stands (1, 115¹). Statements such as that he is called by many names though one (1, 16446; 10, 1145 cp. Val. 102) indicate that his nature was being tentatively abstracted to that of a supreme god, nearly approaching that of the later conception of Brahmā. In this sense the sun is once glorified as a great power of the universe under the name of the 'golden embryo', hiranya-garbha, in RV. 10, 121.³ It is he who measures out space in the air and shines where the sun rises (vv. 5. 6). In the last verse of this hymn, he is called Prajapati, ‘lord of created beings', the name which became that of the chief god of the Brāhmaṇas. It is significant that in the only older passage of the RV. in which it occurs (4, 532), prajapati is an epithet of the solar deity Savitṛ, who in the same hymn (v. 6) is said to rule over what moves and stands 5. There are two other cosmogonic hymns which both explain the origin of the universe as a kind of evolution of the existent (sat) from the non-existent (asat). In 10, 726 it is said that Brahmaṇaspati forged together this world like a smith. From the non-existent the existent was produced. Thence in succession arose the earth, the spaces, Aditi with Dakṣa; and after Aditi the gods were born. The gods then brought forward the sun. There were eight sons of Aditi, but the eighth, Mārtāṇḍa, she cast away; she brought him to be born and to die (i. e. to rise and set). Three stages can be distinguished in this hymn: first the world is produced, then the gods, and lastly the sun. In RV. 10, 129, a more abstract and a very sublime hymn, it is affirmed that nothing existed in the beginning, all being void. Darkness and space enveloped the undifferentiated waters (cp. 10, 82%. 1217, AV. 2, 8). The one primordial substance (ekam) was produced by heat. Then desire (kāma), the first seed of mind (manas) arose. This is the bond between the non- existent and the existent. By this emanation the gods came into being. But here the poet, overcome by his doubts, gives up the riddle of creation as unsolvable. A short hymn of three stanzas (10, 190) forms a sequel to the more general evolution of that just described. Here it is stated that from heat (tapas) was produced order (rta); then night, the ocean, the year; the creator (dhātā) produced in succession sun and moon, heaven and earth, air and ether. In a similar strain to RV. 10, 129 a Brāhmaṇa passage declares that 'formerly nothing existed, neither heaven nor earth nor atmosphere, which being non-existent resolved to come into being' (TB. 2, 2, 9¹ff.). The regular cosmogonic view of the Brāhmaṇas requires the agency of a creator, who is