ng to Hillebrandt, Eternity) is an abstraction that
is born later than her chief sons, Sun and Varuna.[92] Zarathustra
(Zoroaster, not earlier than the close of the first Vedic period) took
the seven [=A]dityas and reformed them into one monotheistic
(dualistic) Spirit (Ahura), with a circle of six moral attendants,
thereby dynamically destroying every physical conception of them.

DAWN.

We have devoted considerable space to Varuna because of the
theological importance with which is invested his personality. If one
admit that a monotheistic Varuna is the _ur_-Varuna, if one see in him
a sign that the Hindus originally worshipped one universally great
superior god, whose image effaced that of all the others,[93] then the
attempt to trace any orderly development in Hindu theology may as well
be renounced; and one must imagine that this peculiar people, starting
with monotheism descended to polytheism, and then leapt again into the
conception of that Father-god whose form, in the end of the Rig Vedic
period, out-varunas Varuna as encompasser and lord of all. If, on the
other hand, one see in Varuna a god who, from the 'covering,' heaven
and cloud and rain, from earliest time has been associated with the
sun as a pair, and recognize in Varuna's loftier form the product of
that gradual elevation to which were liable all the gods at the hands
of the Hindu priests; if one see in him at this stage the highest god
which a theology, based on the worship of natural phenomena, was able
to evolve; then, for the reception of those gods who overthrew him
from his supremacy, because of their greater freedom from physical
restraints, there is opened a logical and historical path--until that
god comes who in turn follows these half-embodied ones, and stands as
the first immaterial author of the universe--and so one may walk
straight from the physical beginning of the Rig Vedic religion to its
spiritual Brahmanic end.

We turn now to one or two phenomena-deities that were never much
tampered with by priestly speculation; their forms being still as
bright and clear as when the first Vedic worshipper, waiting to salute
the rising sun, beheld in all her beauty, and thus praised

THE DAWN.[94]

As comes a bride hath she approached us, gleaming;
All things that live she rouses now to action.
A fire is born that shines for human beings;
Light hath she made, and driven away the darkness.

Wide-reaching hath she risen, to all