ans
knew the myth of the marriage of heaven and earth, with the
consequent birth of the gods. They had the story of the deluge. They
had the still more primitive story of the raising up of the earth
from the bottom of the sea. They had various myths of old conflicts
of the gods, and of the production of the earth and all the men in it
from the dissection of an immense prototypal human monster. Men were
of different castes, they held, because they came from different
portions of Purusha's body when it was cut up. Many stories are to be
found in Indian literature which when found elsewhere are judged to
be products of savage imagination, and the fact that the Rigveda
ignores some of them and refines others, simply shows that the
authors of that collection were on a higher level than their people
in point of cultivation and of piety, as the psalmists and the
prophets of Israel were in advance of theirs. We are led,
accordingly, towards the conclusion that during the period when the
hymns were written those who took charge of the development of
worship in India were seeking to draw away attention from the more
superstitious and childish elements of religion, and to bring to the
front the pure and lofty intercourse man could have with the good
gods. Bad gods are not cultivated; if there are foolish stories about
the gods, they are not repeated, everything dark and terrible, as
well as everything irrational, is removed from the working religion.
Ancestor-worship is not encouraged; family rites continued, but the
worship was wider than the family, and was not restricted to
particular places. The ideas connected with sacrifice are not indeed
very lofty. Sacrifice is, in the first place, barter. Gifts are
provided for the gods, that they may give in their turn. In the
second place it is a social function in which the god and the
worshipper both take part. The food, and especially the soma,
strengthens the god, and man and god are thereby drawn into close
sympathy. But in the third place sacrifice was a piece of magic. The
mere accurate performance of the rite had a mystic efficacy. It was
believed to help to uphold the order of the world; without it the
gods would grow weak, the ordinances of nature would fail, and man
would relapse to the state of savagery. The gods themselves first
sacrificed; from sacrifice they themselves were born, so that
sacrifice is an essential principle of the universe, was so in the
beginning, and mu