[Music] and welcome back now what I'd like to do is to kind of walk us through the diverse set of gods and goddesses that we can call the Vedic Pantheon now at its core Vedic mythology can be said to be the accounts of a fierce struggle that took place between two forces the Devas or the Vedic gods and the asuras or the anti gods and the demons the gods are basically forces of cosmic order of truth Berthe that we talked about of prosperity and goodness while the demons represent chaos decay falsehood it's a battle that's eternal and both sides are kind of equally matched up but the Devas have one little advantage they have us on their side and our offerings of soma and food and hospitality good cheer that's what can give them a bad little edge that they'll need to defeat the demons now remember how I mentioned that there were these Zoroastrians sitting next door in Iran who had cognate religion to that early Vedic culture right and they probably descended from a common indo-iranian culture well there's kind of an interesting sort of inverted parallel between Zoroastrian religion and Vedic religion in terms of divas and uh pseudos the word a surah which means demon in Sanskrit is cognate with a hooter in Old Persian which means God and which was used in the highest deity of the Zoroastrians Ahura Mazda on the other hand the word daiva in sanskrit which means god it's cognate with the old persian diver which means the demons or the gods who are to be rejected so it could have been the case this is a speculation that these were once rival clans or rival communities back when they were all living in the same indo-iranian cultural area and then the then they were kind of split off because of these rivalries then who knows attempting to speculate right the parallels between ancient India and Iran actually don't stop there the Avastin culture had also their own version of soma which they called hama and which seems to have been a stimulating drink that was made from ephedra also the sacrificial ritual of the 0's tree UNS is called yashna which is cognate with the sun spirit yet nia so what does this all mean well again it's hard to go beyond speculating because we don't can't figure out what happened in reality but clearly there was some kind of really really old relationship between these very ancient and hallowed religious traditions and again these are all mysteries that still in some ways remain to be solved maybe you can figure them out okay now let's turn our attention to the way that gods themselves and find out what they're all about there's actually hundreds of gods that find their way into the Rig Veda so we can't talk about all of them but in general they can be divided into five sort of generic types if you want to think about it that way based on their names and their descriptions of them these are deities who a represent natural forces who be reflects certain social principles of the Vedic people see who personify specific human activities D who were associated with different aspects of Vedic ritual performance and E who were kind of just unique personalities first and foremost of this group is this god named Indra so of all of the gods in the massive Vedic Pantheon in dodo is most the most prominent he's a kind of hyper-masculine king of the gods a paramount warrior who basically drinks drinks a swig of soma gets up and smite the demons with his mace which later is called which is called a budget ax later on the Vegeta in popular Hinduism and Buddhism means a thunderbolt here it's a mace and Indra also it's kind of demoted in later by the way the the pictures the that you're gonna be seeing in these videos I should note are from a much later time period mostly from the 19th century actually very recent I've put them in there kind of just to entertain you basically in the rook via the the verbal depictions of the deities tend to be much different than how these pictures these images portray the gods so don't get fooled into thinking that they look like with the pictures actually the Vedic culture was an an iconic culture meaning that they didn't make images of the gods or goddesses in the Vedic period in the early period there's no ancient statues or paintings or freezes or frescoes of the gods until about 200 BC or so after Indra the second most popular God in the beta is Agni who's both the fire itself and also the god of fire agnese manifest in the world is all the different kinds of fires you can encounter there's the fire and the sacrifice the fire of the funeral pyre the fire of the Sun right Agni central role is to be a go-between he transports food and soma offerings all the way up to gods in heaven and in the same way Agni can be a conduit for the gods to come down to us the third most popular deity in the Rig Veda is soma now soma is that mysterious plant we talked about right whose juices are squeezed out filtered and then mixed with milk to make a kind of stimulating drink this reminds me of like a cold brew coffee but we don't know what the plant was some people think it was maybe a kind of mushroom fly agaric some other psychedelic but the best guess actually it was that it was a stimulant maybe actually that ephedra that grows naturally in the Central Asian mountains and which the old Iranian also had access to and called halma anyhow the god soma both represents this physical soma plant on earth and is also just an abstract God at the same time he and Agni are the only deities actually to be physically present during a bathing ritual and the the only ones who ever interact with humans during a normal performance of a ritual the other gods are invited to the party but the the idea is that they don't actually make it to the party they don't come or that they do come and just are not visible to us there's tons of other gods in the Vedas and let me just kind of quickly quickly go through some of them some of the day that gods are embodiments of social concerns that the early Vedic communities had the God of Verona for example is the god of social contracts he's like the god of judicial authority law in the sense who guarantees that when you make a promise you'll keep it he's the embodiment of law and order so it's not just social order but also a cosmic order that Hertha we talked about and that capacity Verona is also in charge of the reigns and other natural phenomena and he can hold them back or make them come at the wrong time if someone violates social law later on in Hinduism this association with water and the oceans turns butter none into the god of the oceans actually hand-in-hand Verona is the god named Mitra the word the word Mitra in Sanskrit he might know means friend hey Mitra and fittingly matera supervises friendships and alliances between people his domain is when people enter into peace treaties alliances agreements where both parties are kind of on equal footing contracts that kind of thing Mithra and varuna are closely matched pair and they often are praised together as a contender a third closely related God to these two is Adi Aman who supervises manners and customs civility decorum being a noble person being an idea he's audio man I guess he could say all three of these guys are called the adityas because they're said to be the sons of a goddess named Aditi Aditi herself then comes to represent the principle of motherhood and also good and righteous behavior motherly behavior now then there's also a large set of gods and goddesses who embody natural forces and I'm just gonna briefly name them there's value who's the god of the wind Judea who's the Sun there's but a genja who's the rain there's siya who's the guy who's a goddess and she represents the dawn rocky is the goddess of the night Lucia is actually interesting she also represents femininity in general and youthful beauty maidenhood kind of attractiveness innocence in a certain way she's described as wearing petticoats and bowing in front of the Sun as he chases after her with desire alright so you first see her bowing and then he comes up over the horizon it's a delicate and sort of fascinating scene actually and we're looking at if you got a minute then there's other deities who are more like singular one-off personalities and not embodiment of some natural force or anything like that we talked about Indra but then there's also the God but a job with thee who's seen as the creative agent for all living beings ironically living creatures are thought to have been created when Prajapati was sacrificed and dismembered actually we'll be looking at this myth in the next unit the ushe winds are twin gods this is another actually old indo-european motif of twin gods but the hush winds are in charge of health and medicine they represent also mobility speed and vigor energy in a certain sense the in the ritual they're important because instead of soma the Ashwin's get an offering of hot milk mixed with ghee in a right - that's called the robotic yeeah yeah it's an independent right and then it got kind of glued into the big soma sacrifices for an Internet then there's a group of God's called the medics who are the storm gods in Vedic culture they're said to be the sons of a god named Rudra or Shiva and as a familiar dude we'll be talking a lot about Shiva in the future my turrets are feisty and headstrong they're kind of like teenagers or like frat boys maybe they're often causing a ruckus in the vedic world in some situations they act as kind of a gang or a posse for indra and they tagged along with indra in his battles against various demons it's again kind of parallel to the ganas that you're gonna find in later Hindu mythology as the minions of Shiva speaking of Shiva as a way to wrap up this segment I wanted to mention two deities who've had sort of minor roles in the Vedic pantheon but who are gonna take like first place in the later bait in the later popular Hindu world this is Vishnu and Shiva out of the 1028 Rig Veda hymns only six are dedicated to Vishnu and only three even mentioned Rudra Shiva Vishnu his claim to fame in the Rig Veda is as a Strider he takes three steps and with these three steps he envelops the three aspects of the cosmos the earth the sky the heavens his steps are what makes these spaces inhabitable to humans and to other beings his feet make the earth the sky and the heavens safe for us to live in Shiva on the other hand is known as Rudra in the Vedas in the Rig Veda and in the way that his role is even more limited than Vishnu his described as being a fierce and malevolent figure wild even but he's also helpful for those who pray to Him and can be a healer today well there you have it a kind of relatively quick I think overview of the various gods and goddesses of the Vedic pantheon there's a lot to talk about but we'll stop here and we'll take a little break and then we'll come back and drill down into actual mythology of three of these deities in particular in the [Music]