e same ideas are prominent in viii. 48,
where Soma is invoked as '_soma_ that has been drunk,'
_i.e.,_ the juice of the ('three days fermented') plant.]

[Footnote 36: In the fourth book, iv. 27. 3. On this myth,
with its reasonable explanation as deduced from the ritual,
see Bloomfield, JAOS. xvi. I ff. Compare also Muir and
Hillebrandt, loc. cit.]

* * * * *

CHAPTER VI.

THE RIG VEDA (CONCLUDED).--YAMA AND OTHER GODS, VEDIC PANTHEISM,
ESCHATOLOGY.

In the last chapter we have traced the character of two great gods of
earth, the altar-fire and the personified kind of beer which was the
Vedic poets' chief drink till the end of this period. With the
discovery of _sur[=a], humor ex hordeo_ (oryzaque; Weber,
_V[=a]japeya_, p. 19), and the difficulty of obtaining the original
_soma_-plant (for the plant used later for _soma_, the _asclepias
acida_, or _sarcostemma viminale_, does not grow in the Punj[=a]b
region, and cannot have been the original _soma_), the status of
_soma_ became changed. While _sur[=a]_ became the drink of the people,
_soma_, despite the fact that it was not now so agreeable a liquor,
became reserved, from its old associations, as the priests' (gods')
drink, a sacrosanct beverage, not for the vulgar, and not esteemed by
the priest, except as it kept up the rite.

It has been shown that these gods, earthly in habitation, absorbed the
powers of the older and physically higher divinities. The ideas that
clustered about the latter were transferred to the former. The
altar-fire, Agni, is at once earth-fire, lightning, and sun. The drink
_soma_ is identified with the heavenly drink that refreshes the earth,
and from its color is taken at last to be the terrestrial form of its
aqueous prototype, the moon, which is not only yellow, but even goes
through cloud-meshes just as _soma_ goes through the sieve, with all
the other points of comparison that priestly ingenuity can devise.

Of different sort altogether from these gods is the ancient
Indo-Iranian figure that now claims attention. The older religion had
at least one object of devotion very difficult to reduce to terms of a
nature-religion.

YAMA

Exactly as the Hindu had a half-divine ancestor, Manu, who by the
later priests is regarded as of solar origin, while more probably he
is only the abstract Adam (man), the progenitor of the race; so in
Yama the Hindu saw the prim