on, but he is not credited with any mythical accomplishments. Indra, on the
other hand, hardly ever causes rain; his activities are wrapped up in mythical
language and often expressed as past achievements. It is recalled how with his
bolt he killed Vr
̇
tra or Vala or some other adversary and so released the
blocked-up waters or the hidden cows. We shall see presently that these stories
contain an Indo-European element. Indra may have taken them over from
Parjanya.^28
Like Parjanya, Indra is sometimes portrayed as a bull. At the Sa ̄kamedha
sacrifice a real bull had to bellow as a signal that Indra was present to receive
his offering and ready for the killing of Vr
̇
tra.^29 Apart from the analogy
between the bull’s bellow and the thunder, the bull image is an expression of
Indra’s terrific strength, a property often emphasized.
As one might expect of such a champion, he is a mighty eater and drinker.
He eats the flesh of twenty bulls or a hundred buffaloes, and drinks whole
lakes of Soma.^30 He then shakes the excess liquid out of his beard, which is
fiery or reddish in colour (hárita), and it comes down as rain (2. 11. 17; 10. 23.
1, 4, 96. 8).
He rejoices in the title vr
̇
trahán-, ‘vr
̇tra-smasher’, applied to him over fifty
times in the Rigveda. The word vr
̇
trá- denotes something or someone that
blocks the way, an obstacle or enemy. As a masculine, Vr
̇
tráh
̇, it is usually the
name of the demon or dragon that blocks the waters and is shattered by
Indra’s bolt. As a neuter plural, vr
̇
tra ̄ ́ or vr
̇tra ̄ ́n
̇i, it has the general sense of
‘opposing forces, enemies’. So vr
̇
trahán- may be understood either as a
generic epithet appropriate to Indra as god of battle or as having specific
reference to his defeat of Vr
̇
tra in his capacity as storm-god. In the Avesta we
find a god Vərəθraγna-, whose name corresponds to vr
̇
trahán- and presum-
ably began as the by-name of an Iranian Indra, though he has developed into
an independent figure.^31 He is unequivocally a god of battle, and his name
means Victorious, with no reference to a storm demon. So this, we may
presume, was the primary sense of the title, and Indra probably had it before
he took over the storm-god’s role. The monster Vr
̇
tra, or at least his name,
then looks like a secondary creation, abstracted from vr
̇
trahán-.^32 However,
the Armenian national hero Vahagn, who developed from the Iranian
Vərəθraγna-, was celebrated for fighting and slaying dragons, and he had the
(^28) Cf. Müller (1897), 756; G. E. Dunkel, Die Sprache 34 (1988–90), 7 f.
(^29) Oldenberg (1917), 74.
(^30) Macdonell (1898), 56, with references; Oldenberg (1917), 165 f.
(^31) Indra is mentioned only in the late Avestan Vide ̄vda ̄t, and there as a demon (dae ̄va, 10. 9,
- 43).
(^32) Cf. R. C. Zaehner, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism (London 1961), 103; Puhvel
(1987), 51, 102; Watkins (1995), 298.
246 6. Storm and Stream