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The Religion of the Veda

ous priest families for this important sacrifice. The soma drink is pressed three times daily: morning, noon, and evening. The gods of the Vedic Pantheon are all interested in these ceremonies; each has a fairly definite share in them. Indra, the god who figures more frequently than any other, has part in all three pressings; but the mid-day pressing belongs to him exclusively. Ushas, the Maiden Dawn, and Agni, God Fire, play, as we have seen, a very important part in the morning. The Ādityas[1] and Ribhus, the latter a sort of clever-handed elves, appear upon the scene in the evening. A host of hymns are addressed to pairs of divinities whose coupling is not always based upon any special natural affinity between them, but upon purely liturgic association: Indra and Agni, Indra and Varuna, Agni and Soma, and so on.

One important class of hymns, the so-called āprī-hymns, that is, "songs of invitation," consist of individual stanzas which invoke certain divinities and personifications of acts and utensils, preliminary to the sacrifice of cattle at the soma rites.[2] God Fire (Agni) is especially called upon under different,

  1. ↑ See below, p. 129.
  2. ↑ See Max Müller, History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, p. 463 ff; Roth, Yāska's Nirukta, p. xxxvi ff; Weber, Indische Studien, x. 89 ff; Grassmann, Translation of the Rig-Veda, vol. i., p. 6; Bergaigne, Journal Asiatique, 1879, p. 17.
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