to the gods in the Satapatha Brahmana and their dread of death. They overcame him by certain sacrifices suggested by Prajapati. Death resented this, and complained that men would now become immortal and his occupation would be gone. To console him, the gods promised that no man in future should become immortal with his body, but only through knowledge after parting with his body. This legend, at least in its present form, is necessarily later than the establishment of minute sacrificial rules. It is only quoted here as an example of the opinion that the gods were once mortal and "just like men." It may be urged, and perhaps with truth, that this belief is the figment of religious decadence. It interests us, however, because it corresponds with the ideas on the subject which we have already found current in the mythologies of the lower races—legends in which it is always so hard to distinguish between gods and the members of a magnified non-natural race of early men. As to the victory of the gods over the Asuras, that is ascribed by the Satapatha Brahmana[1] to the fact that, at a time when neither gods nor Asuras were scrupulously veracious, the gods invented the idea of speaking the truth. The Asuras stuck to lying. The first
- ↑ Muir, iv. 60.
ocean of milk. They churned it with Mount Mandara for a staff and the serpent Hasuki for a cord. The Ramayana and Mahabharata ascribe this churning to the desire of the gods to become immortal. According to the Mahabharata, a Daitya named Rahu insinuated himself among the gods, and drank some of the draught of immortality. Vishnu beheaded him before the draught reached lower than his throat; his head was thus immortal, and is now a constellation. He pursues the sun and moon, who had spied him among the gods, and causes their eclipses by his ferocity. All this is on a level with Australian mythology.
