India, Old and New | Page 9

key to
the religious thought and social conceptions, and even inferentially to
the political institutions of the Aryan Hindus through the many
centuries that rolled by between their first southward migrations into

the Indian peninsula and their actual emergence into history. The Vedic
writings constitute the most ancient documents available to illustrate
the growth of religious beliefs founded on pure Nature-worship, which
translated themselves into a polytheistic and pantheistic idea of the
universe and, in spite of many subsequent transformations, are found to
contain all the germs of modern Hinduism as we know it to-day--and,
indeed, of all the religious thought of India. In the Vedic hymns Nature
itself is divine, and their pantheon consists of the deified forces of
Nature, worshipped now as Agni, the god of Fire; Soma, the god and
the elixir of life; Indra, the god of heaven and the national god of the
Aryans; and again, under more abstract forms, such as Prajapati, the
lord of creation, Asura, the great spirit, Brahmanaspati, the lord of
prayer; and sometimes, again, gathered together into the transcendent
majesty of one all-absorbing divinity, such as Varuna, whose
pre-eminence almost verges on monotheism. But the general
impression left on the Western mind is of a fantastic kaleidoscope, in
which hundreds and even thousands of deities, male and female, are
constantly waxing and waning and changing places, and proceeding
from, and merging their identity in, others through an infinite series of
processes, partly material and partly metaphysical, but ever more and
more subject to the inspiration and the purpose of the Brahman, alone
versed in the knowledge of the gods, and alone competent to propitiate
them by sacrificial rites of increasing intricacy, and by prayers of a
rigid formalism that gradually assume the shape of mere incantations.
This is the great change to which the Brahmanas bear witness. They
show no marked departure from the theology of the Vedas, though
many of the old gods continue to be dethroned either to disappear
altogether, or to reappear in new shapes, like Varuna, who turns into a
god of night to be worshipped no longer for his beneficence, but to be
placated for his cruelty; whilst, on the other hand, Prajapati is raised to
the highest throne, with Sun, Air, and Fire in close attendance. What
the Brahmanas do show is that the Brahman has acquired the
overwhelming authority of a sacerdotal status, not vested merely in the
learning of a theologian, but in some special attribute of his blood, and
therefore transmissible only from father to son. The Brahman was
doubtless helped to this fateful pre-eminence by the modifications

which the popular tongue had undergone in the course of time, and as
the result more especially of migration from the Punjab to the Gangetic
plains. The language of the Vedic hymns had ceased to be understood
by the masses, and its interpretation became the monopoly of learned
families; and this monopoly, like all others, was used by those who
enjoyed it for their own aggrandisement. The language that had passed
out of common usage acquired an added sanctity. It became a sacred
language, and sacred became the Brahman, who alone possessed the
key to it, who alone could recite its sacred texts and perform the rites
which they prescribed, and select the prayers which could best meet
every distinct and separate emergency in the life of man.
In the Brahmanas we can follow the growth of a luxuriant theology for
the use of the masses which, in so far as it was polytheistic, tended to
the infinite multiplication of gods and goddesses and godlings of all
types, and in so far as it was pantheistic invested not only men, but
beasts and insects and rivers and fountains and trees and stones with
some living particle of the divine essence pervading all things; and we
can follow there also the erection on the basis of that theology, of a
formidable ritual of which the exclusive exercise and the material
benefits were the appanage of the Brahman. But we have to turn to a
later collection of writings known as the Upanishads for our knowledge
of the more abstract speculations out of which Hindu thinkers, not
always of the Brahmanical caste, were concurrently evolving the
esoteric systems of philosophy that have exercised an immense and
abiding influence on the spiritual life of India. There is the same
difficulty in assigning definite dates to the Upanishads, though many of
the later ones bear the post-mark of the various periods of theological
evolution with which they coincided. Only some of the earliest ones are
held by many competent authorities to be, in the shape in which they
have reached us, anterior to the time when India first becomes, in any
real sense, historical; but there is no reason