ck's feathers, wandering through the flowering
forests of Vraja, dancing and playing on his flute melodies that fill
the souls of all that hear them with an irresistible passion of love
and delight; it revels in tales of how the precocious boy made wanton
sport with the herdswomen of Vraja, and how the magic of his fluting
drew them to the dance in which they were united to him in a rapture
of love. The book thrills with amorous, sensuous ecstasy; the thought
of Krishna stirs the worshipper to a passion of love in which tears
gush forth in the midst of laughter, the speech halts, and often the
senses fail and leave him in long trances. Erotic emotionalism can go
no further.

Where did this new spirit come from? Some have laboured to prove that
it had its source in Christianity; others have argued that it was
Christianity that was the debtor to India in this respect. Both
theories are in the main impossible. This cult of the child Krishna
arose in India, and, with the possible exception of a few obscure
tales, it never spread outside the circle of Indian religion. But how
and where did it arise? That is a question hard to answer; there is no
direct evidence, and we can only balance probabilities. Now what are
the probabilities?

The worship of Krishna as a babe, a boy, and a young man among the
herdsfolk of Vraja seems to have no relation with the older form of
the religion as set forth in the epic textbooks. It is a new element,
imported from without. The most natural conclusion then is that it
came from the people who are described in it, some tribe that pastured
their herds in the woodlands near Mathura. Perhaps these herdsfolk
were Abhiras, ancestors of the modern Ahir tribes. If so, it would be
natural that their cult should attract attention; for sometimes
Abhiras counted for something in society, and we even find a
short-lived dynasty of Abhira kings reigning in Nasik in the third
century A.D.[29] Be this as it may, it seems very likely that some
pastoral tribe had a cult of a divine child blue or black of hue, and
perhaps actually called by them Krishna or Kanha, "Black-man" (observe
that henceforth Krishna is regularly represented with a blue skin), a
cult in which gross rustic fantasy had free play; that it came in some
circles to be linked on to the epic cycle of Krishna Vasudeva; and
that some Bhagavatas, seeing in it latent possibilities, gave it
polished literary expression and thereby established it as a