ch still clung, in popular feeling, to
the older deities. Varuna, once supreme, sank after a while to the
position of a god of rain, and Indra, Agni, and Soma were frankly
naturalistic, while the impersonal Brahma was too vague to meet popular
demands. What the later generation wanted was a god personal and
divorced from physical phenomena, supreme, ethically high, but invested
with warm humanity. These conditions were fulfilled by Vishnu and Civa,
and particularly by Krishna; that is, the later thought constructed
these new deities in accordance with the demand of the higher and the
lower religious feeling of the time: the two sides of the human demand,
the genial and the terrible, are embodied, the first in Vishnu, the
second in Civa.

+734+. The primeval pair, Heaven and Earth, though represented as the
parents of many gods and worshiped with sacrifices, play no great part
in the Hindu religious system. Dyaus, the Sky, never attained the
proportions of the formally identical Zeus and Jupiter. His attributes
are distinctly those of the physical sky. The higher role is assigned to
Varuna, who is the sky conceived of as a divine Power divorced from
merely physical characteristics;[1270] the mass of phenomena connected
with the sky (thunder, lightning, and such like) are isolated and
referred to various deities. Prithivi, the Earth, in like manner,
retains her physical attributes, and does not become the nourishing
mother of all things.[1271]

With a partial exception in the case of Ushas[1272] (Dawn) the early
Hindu pantheon contains no great female figure; there are female
counterparts of male deities, but no such transcendent personages as
Isis, Athene, and Demeter. Whether this fact is to be explained from
early Hindu views of the social position of women, or from some other
idea, is uncertain. In certain modern religious cults, however, the
worship of the female principle (Cakti) is popular and influential. It
is probable that in early times every tribe or district had its female
divine representative of fertility, an embryonic mother-goddess. If the
Aryan Hindus had such a figure, she failed to grow into a great
divinity. But the worship of such deities came into Aryan India at a
relatively recent date, apparently from non-Aryan sources, and has been
incorporated in Hindu systems. Various forms of Cakti have been brought
into relation with various gods, the most important being those that
have become attached to