onal earth, of
the fishing up from the waters of a tiny earth which grew greater, of
the development of men out of beasts, with a dozen other such notions as
are familiar to contemporary Bushmen, Australians, Digger Indians, and
Cahrocs. But in Greece and India these ideas coexist with myths and
religious beliefs as purely spiritual and metaphysical as the belief in
the Pachacamac of Garcilasso and the Amautas of Peru.

CHAPTER VII. INDO-ARYAN MYTHS--SOURCES OF EVIDENCE.

Authorities--Vedas--Brahmanas--Social condition of Vedic
India--Arts--Ranks--War--Vedic fetishism--Ancestor worship--Date
of Rig-Veda Hymns doubtful--Obscurity of the Hymns--Difficulty
of interpreting the real character of Veda--Not primitive but
sacerdotal--The moral purity not innocence but refinement.

Before examining the myths of the Aryans of India, it is necessary to
have a clear notion of the nature of the evidence from which we derive
our knowledge of the subject. That evidence is found in a large and
incongruous mass of literary documents, the heritage of the Indian
people. In this mass are extremely ancient texts (the Rig-Veda, and
the Atharva-Veda), expository comments of a date so much later that
the original meaning of the older documents was sometimes lost (the
Brahmanas), and poems and legendary collections of a period later still,
a period when the whole character of religious thought had sensibly
altered. In this literature there is indeed a certain continuity; the
names of several gods of the earliest time are preserved in the legends
of the latest. But the influences of many centuries of change, of
contending philosophies, of periods of national growth and advance, and
of national decadence and decay, have been at work on the mythology of
India. Here we have myths that were perhaps originally popular tales,
and are probably old; here again, we have later legends that certainly
were conceived in the narrow minds of a pedantic and ceremonious
priesthood. It is not possible, of course, to analyse in this place all
the myths of all the periods; we must be content to point out some which
seem to be typical examples of the working of the human intellect in
its earlier or its later childhood, in its distant hours of barbaric
beginnings, or in the senility of its sacerdotage.

The documents which contain Indian mythology may be divided, broadly
speaking, into four classes. First, and most ancient in date of
composition, are the