Parjanya

Three hymns of the Rigveda are addressed to Parjanya and almost everything the tradition has to say about him is inside them. He is the rain, and the poets do not separate the god from the weather: the same word names the cloud, the water that falls out of it and the power that sends it, and a verse can move between the three without marking the change. The imagery is agricultural and frankly sexual. Parjanya is a bull who bellows, and the bellowing is thunder. He deposits the seed in the plants. The winds break loose, the lightning falls, the herbs shoot up, and the earth is described as bowing under him. One hymn asks him to rain and then, having got what it asked for, asks him to stop.

What makes him unusual in the Rigvedic pantheon is that he is not a warrior. Indra also brings rain, but he brings it by killing something, and the release of the waters is the consequence of a victory. Parjanya simply rains. The hymns to him contain no combat, no enemy and no weapon, and their concern is the ordinary anxiety of people who grow things and keep cattle: whether the rain will come, whether it will come at the right time, and whether it will stop before it does damage. That gives this small group of hymns a domestic register the rest of the collection largely lacks.

He is also one of the clearest points of contact between Vedic religion and its Indo-European relatives. The name has been set beside the Baltic Perkunas and the Slavic Perun since the nineteenth century, and beside the wider family of thunder gods whose names are built on the same consonants. The comparison is standard and it is not settled, because the Vedic figure is closer to rain than to thunder, and the sound correspondences have been argued over for as long as the comparison has existed.

By the Puranic period the Adityas are twelve, one presiding over each month of the year, and Parjanya is where the two standard lists come apart. The arrangement preserved in the Vishnu Purana names him among the twelve and gives him a month and the fixed company of sage, gandharva, apsaras, yaksha, serpent and rakshasa that each Aditya travels with. The list in the Bhagavata Purana also has twelve names, and Parjanya is not one of them; Savitr stands where the other text puts him. Ten of the twelve names are common to both and four are not, and Parjanya is on the disputed side of that division.

The atlas records the membership as claimed rather than settled, which is the only honest way to hold it. The tradition did not reconcile the two lists, and there is no third text with the standing to decide between them. A reader who meets Parjanya among the twelve has met the Vishnu Purana arrangement, and a reader who does not find him there is not holding a defective copy.

There is a plausible reason for a rain god to be in the class at all, and it is the same reason a compiler might drop him. The twelve Adityas of the Puranas are a solar group matched to the solar year, while the older Rigvedic Adityas were not solar but sovereign, concerned with oaths, shares and the right ordering of things. Parjanya fits neither description exactly. He is a weather god inside a group that had been about law and became about the sun, and an editor working from either end of that development had grounds to leave him out. What the disagreement preserves is the seam between the two ideas of what an Aditya is.