The Classes of the Gods

We have spent ten chapters sorting the Hindu divine into classes. We spoke of the host and the guardians, the mothers and the spirits of earth and water, the artists of the sky and the beings of the dark, the two great courts of Shiva and Vishnu. And a careful reader might, by now, have grown suspicious. These tidy classes — are they really in the tradition, or are they a scholar’s filing system, a modern grid laid over a wild and various reality to make it manageable? It is a fair suspicion, and this chapter exists to answer it. Because the answer is that the classification is not ours. Hinduism sorted its gods into classes and troops from its oldest texts, gave the enterprise technical names, and even printed a catalogue of the ranks of divine beings in its great dictionary. The ecosystem is not our metaphor. It is how the tradition itself counted the divine.

Gods that come in troops

Go back to the beginning, to the Ṛgveda, and notice a habit so pervasive it is easy to miss: the Vedic gods keep arriving in groups. We have already met the Maruts, the storm-troop who ride with Rudra — a named collective, a gaṇa, addressed and praised as a body. But they are only the most famous of many. There are the Ādityas, the sovereign sons of the goddess Aditi, a class of luminous, law-keeping deities headed by Varuṇa and Mitra. There are the Vasus, the “good” or “bright” ones, the powers of the material world. There are the Viśvedevas, whose name simply means “all-gods” — an entire collective invoked as a collective, the gods-taken-together given hymns of their own. There are the Sādhyas, a shadowy older class; the Ṛbhus, three craftsmen so skilled they were raised from mortals to godhood; the Aṅgirases, the singing ancestors. The Vedic imagination did not, on the whole, picture a set of wholly separate individual gods. It pictured companies — troops, classes, families, choirs — and it worshipped them by the company as readily as one by one.

This is the deep root of everything this treatise has described. The gaṇa, the “troop,” is not a late Puranic invention grafted onto a tidier Vedic monotheism; it is there in the oldest layer, in the storm-host and the all-gods and the sovereign Ādityas. When the later tradition surrounds Shiva with his gaṇas and Vishnu with his nitya-sūris, it is continuing a habit as old as the Veda itself: to see the divine as plural, grouped, arrayed. The word for it, in the developed vocabulary, is gaṇa-devatā — the “troop-deity,” the class of gods worshipped as a collective. It is a technical Sanskrit category, and it names precisely the thing we have been studying.

Thirty-three, and the descent to one

The most important of all these collectives is a number: thirty-three. From the Ṛgveda onward, the gods are reckoned as “the thirty-three” — trayastriṃśa — and later simply as the tridaśa, “the thirty.” The classical accounting, spelled out in the epics and Purāṇas, breaks the thirty-three into its classes: eight Vasus, the elemental powers (earth, water, fire, wind, sky, sun, moon, stars, in one common list); eleven Rudras, the fierce forces, later identified with the ten vital breaths of the body plus the self; twelve Ādityas, the sovereign solar principles, one for each month of the year; and two more to complete the count — in most reckonings the twin Aśvins, the horse-headed physicians of dawn. Eight and eleven and twelve and two: thirty-three, the ordered totality of the gods.

And here the tradition does something with that number that is, quietly, the entire thesis of this book stated in its oldest and sharpest form. In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad — the great early Upaniṣad embedded in the Yajurveda — there is a scene of intellectual combat (3.9). At the court of King Janaka, the fierce sage Yājñavalkya is challenged by a series of questioners, and one of them, Vidagdha Śākalya, asks him a deceptively simple question: how many gods are there? Yājñavalkya answers, at first, with the grand liturgical number: three thousand three hundred and six. But Śākalya presses. And Yājñavalkya begins to count downward. Yes, he says, but how many gods are there, really? Thirty-three. And really? Six. And really? Three. Two. One and a half. And, at the last, pressed to the floor of the question — one.

The larger numbers, Yājñavalkya explains, are the powers, the glories, the manifestations of the gods; the gods themselves are the thirty-three; and the thirty-three, followed inward, are the expressions of fewer and fewer principles, until at the centre there is a single reality, the one breath, the one Brahman, out of which the whole shining multitude has been spread. This is the moment the tradition looks its own plurality in the face and tells the truth about it. The three thousand and the thirty-three and the one are not rival answers. They are the same reality counted at different depths — the one seen as many when you look outward at its powers, the many seen as one when you follow them home. Everything this treatise has argued about the gaṇas and the yoginīs and the vyūhas — that the retinue is the deity unfolded, the deity the retinue gathered — is already here, in a sage’s descending breath, three thousand years ago. The Hindu cosmos was never confused about whether it had one god or millions. It had always had both, and it knew exactly how. (The sheer arithmetic of that plurality — the famous “thirty-three crore” — has its own popular history, which we untangle in How many gods does Hinduism have?)

The catalogue in the dictionary

If that is the philosophical proof, here is the plainest possible one, and it is almost comic in its bluntness. Around the middle of the first millennium of the common era, a scholar named Amarasiṃha compiled the Amarakośa, the “Immortal Treasury,” the greatest and most enduring thesaurus of the Sanskrit language, memorised by students for well over a thousand years. Its opening section, the Svargavarga or “Heaven-Class,” catalogues the words for heavenly things — and it comes, very quickly, to the ranks of divine beings. And there, in a single verse, the tradition simply lists the classes — the deva-yoni, the “kinds of divine birth”:

the vidyādharas, the apsarases, the yakṣas and rakṣases, the gandharvas and kinnaras, the piśācas, the guhyakas, the siddhas, and the bhūtas — these are the deva-yonis.

Read that list again and count what it contains. The knowledge-flyers. The celestial dancers. The treasure-spirits and the demons. The musicians and the half-beings. The flesh-eaters. The guardians of hidden wealth. The perfected adepts. The ghosts. It is, almost exactly, the table of contents of this treatise — the very ranks we have spent chapter after chapter meeting, set down in a single verse in the standard dictionary that every educated Hindu for a millennium learned by heart. The classification of the divine into ordered classes of being is not a modern academic imposition, not an Orientalist grid, not our invention. It is native. The tradition knew it had these ranks, named them, numbered them, and taught them to schoolchildren.

The mount as a member of the court

One last class deserves naming here, because it runs across every deity we have met and we have so far seen only in pieces: the vāhana, the mount. We met Nandin as Shiva’s bull; we met Garuḍa as Vishnu’s eagle. But step back and the vāhana is revealed as a category — a whole class of retinue-being with its own logic. Every great deity rides a creature, and the creature is never mere transport. It is an aspect of the deity’s own nature made animal and set beneath, or beside, the god. Vishnu rides the eagle Garuḍa, the solar bird of the heights; Shiva the bull Nandin, dharma and generative power; the Goddess the lion, sovereign ferocity; Gaṇeśa the mouse, the small gnawing thing that penetrates every obstacle; Kārttikeya the peacock; Sarasvatī the swan that separates milk from water as wisdom separates truth from falsehood; Yama the buffalo of death; Agni the ram; Indra the great white elephant Airāvata. Each mount is worshipped, named, and given its own character; each is the god’s power to move and act, analysed out and given a body — exactly as the weapon is the god’s power to strike, the commander the god’s power to marshal, the consort the god’s power to bless. The vāhana is the retinue at its most constant companion: the animal energy of the divine, always underfoot, always part of the court.

So the suspicion this chapter began with can be laid to rest. When we sorted the Hindu divine into hosts and guardians and mothers and spirits and mounts and emanations, we were not imposing an order on a chaos. We were following an order the tradition laid down for itself — in the troops of the Ṛgveda, in the thirty-three that descend to one, in the ten deva-yonis of the dictionary, in the classes of mount and weapon and commander that repeat around every god. The cosmos is counted in classes because it is ordered in classes; the ecosystem has a taxonomy, and the taxonomy is Sanskrit. It remains only to see how that ordered multitude is governed — for a cosmos sorted into ranks and classes is a cosmos that can be administered, and the officers of that administration are where we turn next.