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at the time at which we are speaking! Indra was the chief of the Gods in the Epic period. In the Sutra literature we learn that Sita the farrow goddess is the wife of Indra. Is it then an untenable conjecture that Rama, the hero of the Ramayana, is in his original conception like Arjuna, the hero of the Hahabharata, only a new edition of the Indra of the Rig Veda, battling with the demons of drought ? The myth of Indra has thus been mixed up with the epic which describes a historic war in Northern India, and the epic which describes the historic conquest of Southern India? "
IIL Prof, facobi.—" The foundation of the Ramayana would be a celestial myth of the Veda transformed into a narrative of earthly adventures according to a not uncommon development Sita can be traced to the Rig Veda, where she appears as the Furrow personified and invoked as a goddess. In some of the Grihya-sutras, she again appears as a genius of the plough-field, is praised as a being of great beauty and is accounted the wife of Indra or Parjanya the rain-god. There are traces of this origin in the Ramayana itself. For Sita is represented, as having emerged from the earth, when her father Janaka was once ploughing and at last disappears underground in the arms of the goddess Earth. Her husband Rama would be no other than Indra, and his conflict with Ravana would represent the Indra- Frttrd myth of the Rig Veda. This identification is confirmed by the name of Ravana's son being Ipdrajit or Indra-Satru, the latter being actually an epithet of /Vritra in the Rig Veda, Ravana's most notable feat, the rape of Sita, has its prototype in the stealing of the cows recovered by Indra* Hanumat, the chief of the monkeys and Rama's ally in the recovery of Sita, is the son of the wind-god wit& the patronymic Maruti and is described as flying hundreds o£ ? The later Puranas tell us he was an incarnation, of Vlshnu-^bmt Vishnu himself had not risen to prominence;