The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

392 Hymns of the Atris
The variety and flexible use of these images — they are
sometimes employed in a rapid succession in the same hymn —
belongs to a period of conscious symbolism in which the image
has not hardened and crystallised into the myth but is constantly
a figure and a parable whose sense still lives and is still plastic
in the originating imagination.
The actual legends about Agni, the developed parables as
distinct from the less elaborate figure, are rare or non-existent —
in remarkable contrast with the wealth of myth which crowds
about the names of Indra and the Ashwins. He participates in the
legendary actions of Indra, the Python-slaying, the recovery of
the herds, the slaying of the Dasyus; his own activity is universal
but in spite of his supreme greatness or perhaps because of it
he seeks no separate end and claims no primacy over the other
gods. He is content to be a worker for man and the helpful
deities. He is the doer of the great Aryan work and the pure
and sublime mediator between earth and heaven. Disinterested,
sleepless, invincible this divine Will-force works in the world as a
universal Soul of power housed in all beings, Agni Vaishwanara,
the greatest, most powerful, most brilliant and most impersonal
of all the cosmic Deities.
The name, Agni, is translated here Power, Strength, Will,
the God-will, or the Flame according to the context. The names
of the Rishis are also given, wherever necessary, their significant
value, as in the first hymn Gavisthira which means the Steadfast
in the Light or the general name Atri. Atri means either the
Eater or the Traveller; Agni himself is the Atri as he is also the
Angiras; out of a devouring desire, experience and enjoyment of
the forms of the world he advances to the liberated truth and
delight of the soul in the possession of its infinite existence.