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 personification of various phenomena, the sun, thunder, fire, rivers, and so forth, but these deities unlike the Semitic gods had little to do with special tribes or localities and the philosophic Indian easily traced a connection between them.  It is not difficult to see that sun, fire and lightning have something in common.  The gods are frequently thought of as joined in couples, triads or larger companies and early worship probably showed the beginnings of a feature which is prominent in the later ritual, namely, that a sacrifice is not an isolated oblation offered to one particular god but a series of oblations presented to a series of deities.  There was thus little disposition to exalt one god and annihilate the others, but every disposition to identify the gods with one another and all of them with something else.  Just as rivers, mountains and plains are dimly seen to be parts of a whole which later ages call nature, so are the gods seen to be parts of some divine whole which is greater than any of them.  Even in the Rig Veda we find such sentiments as “The priests speak of the One Being in many ways:  they call it Agni, Yama, Matarisvan[156].”  Hence it is not surprising