Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/76

LECTURE THE SECOND.

The Hieratic Religion. – The Pantheon of the Veda.

Fundamental traits of early Vedic religion – False view of the nature of Vedic poetry – The Rig-Veda as sacrificial poetry – Difficulty of understanding the ritual character of the Rig-Veda – Poetry addressed to the Goddess Dawn – A hymn to the sacrifice post – The Goddess Dawn as the symbol of liberality at the sacrifice – Some erroneous estimates of Goddess Dawn – Agni the son of "Baksheesh" – Practical purposes of Vedic poetry – The Rig-Veda contains the religion of the upper classes – The ritual of the Rig-Veda – The āprī-hymns – Nature-worship the keynote of the Rig-Veda – India's climate and nature-worship – Vedic and Hellenic mythology compared – Arrested anthropomorphism – Definition of the word Pantheon as applied to the Veda – Faulty classifications of the Vedic gods – Chronology of the gods – Different degrees of certainty about the origin of the gods – Classification of the gods in these lectures.

THE religion which is contained in the bulk of the the so-called "revealed" (çrauta) Vedic literature, that is in the main body of the hymns of the Rig-Veda, the Yajur Veda, the Sāma-Veda, and the Brahmanas, is a hieratic or priestly religion. As regards its mechanism, or its external practices, it is unmistakably liturgic or ritualistic. As regards its