ommunication between gods and initiated mortals.
Hence their great sacredness and the silence maintained throughout the
Vedic and the Brahmanical periods about any object concerned with, or
referring to, reading and writing. It was the language of the gods. If
our Western critics can only understand what the Ancient Hindu writers
meant by Rhutaliai, so often mentioned in their mystical writings, they
will be in a position to ascertain the source from which the Hindus
first derived their knowledge of writing.

A secret language, common to all schools of occult science once
prevailed throughout the world. Hence Orpheus learnt "letters" in the
course of his initiation. He is identified with Indra; according to
Herodotus he brought the art of writing from India; his complexion
swarthier than that of the Thracians points to his Indo-Aryan
nationality--supposing him to have been "a bard and priest," and not a
god; the Pelasgians are said to have been born in Thracia; they are
believed (in the West) to have first possessed the art of writing, and
taught the Phoenicians; from the latter all modern alphabets proceed.
I submit, then, with all these coincidences and sequences, whether the
balance of proof is on the side of the theory that the Aryans
transmitted the art of writing to the people of the West; or on the
side which maintains that they, with their caste of scholarly Brahmans,
their noble sacerdotal tongue, dating from high antiquity, their
redundant and splendid literature, their acquaintance with the most
wonderful and recondite potentialities of the human spirit, were
illiterate until the era of Panini, the grammarian and last of the
Rishis. When the famous theorists of the Western colleges can show us a
river running from its mouth back to its source in the feeble mountain
spring, then may we be asked to believe in their theory of Aryan
illiteracy. The history of human intellectual development shows that
humanity always passes through the stage of ideography or pictography
before attaining that of cursive writing. It therefore remains with the
Western critics who oppose the antiquity of Aryan Scriptures to show us
the pictographic proofs which support their position. As these are
notoriously absent, it appears they would have us believe that our
ancestors passed immediately from illiteracy to the Devanagari
characters of Panini's time.

Let the Orientalists bear in mind the conclusions drawn from a caref