Maruts and the ritual paths to immortality: hints of Indo-Iranian doctrines

In 1929 L.D. Barnett compared the Vedic Maruts with the Iranian Fravašis: he maintained that a more ancient “host of genii dwelling in heaven and constantly waging battles in the sky against the power of darkness” might have been reinterpreted as a group of storm-gods as Maruts. Chakravarty (1991-’92) countered the lateness of this atmospheric interpretation, showing that this function was already meaningful in the Ṛgveda. G. Dumézil (1953) also emphasised the shared nature of the Maruts and Fravašis as a warrior group in the service of a pre-eminent god (Indra/Ahura Mazdā), which could be included in the list of heirs of the Indo-Iranian Männerbund. Widengren, on the other hand, (1965) insisted on the pre-Zoroastrian character of the Fravašis. Most importantly, Gnoli (1982) asserted that there is no special relationship of the Maruts with the dead and their cult, instead crucial in the ancient Fravašis (Boyce 1975: 124-7; Hintze 2009). The purpose of our paper is to show that the Vedic Maruts might have originally been in a close relationship with the after-death world, being mortal men who later on attained the fellowship of the gods (see e.g. Meyer 1883: 218), taking on that role Söderblom (1899:408) attributed to the Fravašis, as personifications of deads’ souls. We will point out the relevance of Sāmavedic data (e.g. PB 17.1, compared with JB 2.224) that illustrate the role played by the Marut-stoma in securing the access to the svarga loka to the Daivas’ Vrātya group.