Their chief office is to exercise benign protection and bestow wealth.

Once they are invited to come to the sacrifice "with the gods," but this, of course, is not meant to exclude them from the list of gods[56].
The antithesis of male and female, to Bergaigne's insistence on which reference was made above (p.

43), even here in this most obvious of forms, common to so many religions, shows itself so faintly that it fails utterly to support that basis of sexual dualism on which the French scholar lays so much stress.

Dyaus does, indeed, occasionally take the place of Indra, and as a bellowing bull impregnate earth, but this is wholly incidental and not found at all in the hymns directly lauding Heaven and Earth.

Moreover, instead of "father and mother" Heaven and Earth often are spoken of as "the two mothers," the significance of which cannot be nullified by the explanation that to the Hindu 'two mothers' meant two parents, and of two parents one must be male,--Bergaigne's explanation.