triple. Triple Indra, the _Veda_ says. In that description
is the preface to a theogony of which Hesiod wrote the final page. It
was the germ of sacred dynasties that ruled the Aryan and the
Occidental skies. From it came the grandiose gods of Greece and Rome.
From it also came the paler deities of the Norse. Meanwhile ages fled.
Life nomad and patriarchal ceased. From forest and plain, temples
arose; from hymns, interpretations; from prayer, metaphysics; for
always man has tried to analyze the divine, always too, at some halt
in life, he has looked back and found it absent.

In meditation it was discerned that Indra was an effect, not the
cause. It was discerned also that that cause was not predicable of the
gods who, in their undulance and fluidity, suggested ceaseless
transformations and consequently something that is transformed.

The idea, patiently elaborated, resulted in a drainage of the fluid
myths and the exteriorisation of a being entirely abstract. Designated
first as Brahmanaspati, Lord of Prayer, afterward more simply as
Brahma, he was assumed to have been asleep in the secret places of the
sky, from which, on awakening, he created what is.

The conception, ideal itself, was not, however, ideal enough. The
labour of creating was construed as a blemish on the splendour of the
Supreme. It was held that the Soul of Things could but loll, majestic
and inert, on a lotos of azure. Then, above Brahma, was lifted Brahm,
a god neuter and indeclinable; neuter as having no part in life,
indeclinable because unique.

There was the apex of the world's most poetic creed, one distinguished
over all others in having no founder, unless a heavenly inspiration be
so regarded. But the apex required a climax. Inspiration provided it.

The forms of matter and of man, the glittering apsaras of the
vermillion dawns, Indra himself, these and all things else were
construed into a bubble that Brahm had blown. The semblance of reality
in which men occur and, with them, the days of their temporal breath,
was attributed not to the actual but to Maya--the magic of a high
god's longing for something other than himself, something that should
contrast with his eternal solitude and fill the voids of his infinite
ennui. From that longing came the bubble, a phantom universe, the
mirage of a god's desire. Earth; sea and sky; all that in them is, all
that has been and shall be, are but the changing convolutions of a
dream.

In that drea