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had been. Nay, more, he is explicitly declared to be "the best of the gods."[71] That best means greatest may be shown from the same work, where in savage fable it is recited that all the gods, including Indra, ran up to him to get his strength.[72] But especially in the Upanishads is Vishnu the one great god left from the Rig Veda. And it is with the philosophical (not with the ritualistic) Vishnu that Krishna is equated.
Of Çiva, on the other hand, the prototype is Rudra ('red'), his constant sobriquet. In the Rig Veda he is the god of red lightning, who is the father of the Maruts, the storm-gods. His attributes of a fulgurant god are never lost. Even as Çiva the All-god he is still the god of the blue neck, whose three-forked trident and home among the mountains remind us of his physical origin. He is always the fairest of the gods, and both early and late he is terrible, to be averted by prayer, even where his magic 'medicines' are asked for. To him are addressed the most suppliant cries: "O Rudra, spare us, strike not the men, slay not the kine." In the Atharva Veda at every step one finds characteristics which on the one hand are but exaggerations of the type formulated in the Rig Veda, and on the other precursors of the signs of the later god. In Çivaism, in contradistinction to Vishnuism, there is not a trace of the euhemerism which has been suspected in the Krishna-Vishnu cult. The Rudra of the Rig Veda already begins to be identified with the triune fire, for he bears the standing epithet of fire, "he of three mothers."[73] And this name he keeps, whether as Rudra, who is "brilliant as the sun" (RV. i. 43.5), whose weapon is "the shining one that is emitted from the sky and passes along the earth" (ib. vii. 46.3); or again, as the "red boar of the sky," the "holder of the bolt" (ib. ii. 33. 3), and, above all gods, "the terrible" (x. 126.5).
Coming to the Brahmanic period one finds him a dweller in the mountain tops, of a red color, with a blue neck, the especial lord of the mountains, and so of robbers; while he is also the 'incantation-god,' the 'god of low people.' Some of these are Rudra's attributes; but here his name is already Çiva, so that one may trace the changes down the centuries till he finds again in the epic that Çiva is the lord of mountains, the patron of thieves (Hara, robber?), and endowed with the trident, the blue neck,[74] and the three mothers of old. In the middle period he has so many titles that one probably has to
