Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/135

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
The Prehistoric Gods
119

and must be discarded in order to release from existence.

But these two religions began at approximately the same point, and they continue with enough of the same materials to make the study of each in some measure dependent upon the other. We are here concerned with the Vedic side only. A very considerable number of important Vedic divinities, religious conceptions, and sacred institutions belong to this common Aryan period.[1] Their sphere is enlarged, their meaning better defined, and their chronology shifted across long periods of time, if we keep our eye on the Avesta. Of course we must not neglect to allow for the process of recoining which these ideas have passed through in India. In a certain sense every prehistoric religious idea that has managed to survive and to emerge in India has become Hindu; not the least fascinating part of these researches is to show just how the spirit of India nationalises or individualises the ideas that were born on a different soil.

Two spheres of Vedic ideas and practices concern us here in a particular degree. The first is the sphere of the great Vedic god Varuna, his dual partner

  1. ↑ See, Spiegel, Die Arische Periode; Darmestetter, Sacred Books of the East, iv., p. lvi, ff; Oldenberg, Die Religion des Veda, pp. 26 ff., 341 ff; Hillebrandt, Rituallitteratur, p. 11, and the bibliographic notes there given; Macdonell, Vedic Mythology, p. 7 ff.
This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.