Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/151

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The Prehistoric Gods
135

"Good Kingdom"; Spenta Armaiti, "Holy Harmony"; Haurvatāt, "Soundness," "Health"; and Ameretat, "Immortality." It is a beautiful, heavenly hierarchy, but it is unmythological, non-naturalistic to the bone. If anywhere, then here is the place where sprang up purely symbolic gods in the manner of the symbolic creations in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.

As for the Shemitic source of this deified solar system, Professor Oldenberg, if I understand him aright, is in part led thereto by the striking ethical character which is manifested by the gods of this group at so early a period of Indo-European history as is the common period of Persia and India. He thinks that the Shemites preceded the Indo-Europeans in the evolution of ethical concepts, and that the ethical coloring of the Ahura-Varuna myth came along with the divinities themselves. But, as I have shown, we find the chief Aryan ethical concept, the ṛta, safely imbedded in the Persian dynastic Arta-names that are reported in the Cuneiform Tel-el-Amarna tablets, 1600 years B.C. Now that date lies far back of the period from which Professor Oldenberg would deduce his results. I should prefer to judge that the wide prevalence of this idea at a very early date shows rather that some, if not all, Indo-Europeans had advanced in ethical

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