followers of Indra. They are referred to as

Forcing their way with baneful windstorms,
Mighty destroyers, the deluge of the storm god,
Stalking at the right hand of the storm god.[45]

When we deal with a deity in his most archaic form it is difficult to
distinguish him from a demon. Even the beneficent Ea is associated
with monsters and furies. "Evil spirits", according to a Babylonian
chant, were "the bitter venom of the gods". Those attached to a deity
as "attendants" appear to represent the original animistic group from
which he evolved. In each district the character of the deity was
shaped to accord with local conditions.

At Nippur, which was situated on the vague and shifting boundary line
between Sumer and Akkad, the chief god was Enlil, whose name is
translated "lord of mist", "lord of might", and "lord of demons" by
various authorities. He was a storm god and a war god, and "lord of
heaven and earth ", like Ea and Anu. An atmospheric deity, he shares
the attributes of the Indian Indra, the thunder and rain god, and
Vayu, the wind god; he also resembles the Semitic Adad or Rimman, who
links with the Hittite Tarku. All these are deities of tempest and the
mountains--Wild Huntsmen in the Raging Host. The name of Enlil's
temple at Nippur has been translated as "mountain house", or "like a
mountain", and the theory obtained for a time that the god must
therefore have been imported by a people from the hills. But as the
ideogram for "mountain" and "land" was used in the earliest times, as
King shows, with reference to foreign countries,[46] it is more
probable that Enlil was exalted as a world god who had dominion over
not only Sumer and Akkad, but also the territories occupied by the