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67 gressed—some texts suggest for well over a thousand years- Vishnu ("Active") was made the Chief. But when the fighting was over, Indra, having contributed so much to the victory, claimed the supremacy. As in the Greek Theogony, one of his first acts to es- tablish his claim was to slay his own father. The Rig-Veda (Book iv: 18, 12) asks Indra rhetorically: "Indra, who made thy mothera widow?" The answer follows also as a question: "What god was present in the fray, when thou didst slay thy father, seizing him by the foot?" For this crime Indra was excluded by the gods from the drinking of the Soma, thereby endangering his continued immortality. They "ascended up to Heaven," leaving Indra with the kine he had re- trieved. But "he went up after them, with the raised Thunder- weapon," ascending from the northern place of the gods. Fearing his weapon, the gods shouted: "Do not hurl!" and agreed to let In- dra share once again in the divine nourishments. Indra's seizing of the leadership of the gods, however, did not go unchallenged. The challenge came from Tvashtri, to whom oblique references are made in the Hymns as “the Firstborn"—a fact that may explain his own claim to the succession. Indra smote him quickly with the Thunder-Weapon, the very weapon that Tvashtri had fashioned for him. But then the struggle was taken over by Vritra ("The Obstructor"), whom some texts call the firstborn of Tvashtri but whom some scholars interpret as having been an_artifi- cial monster, because he quickly grew to an immense size. At first Indra was bested, and he fled to a far corner of Earth. When all the gods then abandoned him, only the twenty-one Maruts stood by his side. They were a group of gods who manned the fastest aerial cars, who "loud roaring as the winds make the mountains rock and reel" as they "lift themselves aloft": These verily wondrous, red of hue, Speed on n their course with a roar ne 7 ee ee over the ridges of the sky... And spread themselves with beams of light . . . Bright, celestial, with lightning in their hands and helmets of gold upon their heads. With the aid of the Maruts, Indra returned to battle Vritra. The hymns which describe the fight in glowing terms have been trans- lated by J. Muir (Original Sanskirt Texts) into rhyming poetic verses: The Missiles of Zeus and Indra