1. WHEN we prepare to investigate one of the world's great religions, and before we enter on an analytical study of details, we naturally incline, in our desire to feel firm ground under our feet, to ask the preliminary question: What is its character? in what category should it be classed? to what division of the spiritual world does it belong? Polytheism? Pantheism? Animism? or what other? When it is the Rig-Veda into which we are about to plunge, we doubly feel the need of some such guiding thread, some anchor to rest upon, for its 1028 hymns, bristling with names and allusions, produce, on a first perusal, a labyrinthine, chaotic, wholly bewildering impression. But alas, a direct, plain answer to such a question is seldom, if ever, possible, and, in the case of the Rig-Veda, perhaps a little less so than in that of any other analogous spiritual document. The growth of a long series of centuries, elaborated in many million busy, subtle brains, containing a great race's spiritual food for as many centuries to come and materials for endless transformations, could not

possibly be so simple and transparent a thing as to admit of a sweeping definition in one word. The study of the Zend-Avesta showed us how many varied elements, and how intricately stratified, go to the making of a great national religion. The same unconscious work of time and influences confronts us in the Veda, but by so much more many-sided and complicated by how much the contemplative, introspective character which the Aryas developed

in India is more involved and self-absorbed than that of their sternly simple, active, and hardy Eranian brethren.

2. Let us, however, attempt to answer the question with which we began the present chapter, just to see how far and deep it will carry us. Even a cursory first study of our text will establish the following points: A great many gods are named and invoked in the Rig-Veda; consequently, the religion it embodies is decidedly POLYTHEISTIC; the spirits of deceased ancestors come in for a large share of honor and worship, so that ANIMISM may be said to be a conspicuous feature of it; an early tendency to view the deity as pervading the universe, both as a whole and in its minutest parts, animate or inanimate—a view exhaustively expressed in such words as these: "He whose loins the seas are" is also "contained in this drop of water"-early reveals a strong attraction towards PANTHEISM; while many are the passages which explicitly inform us that the various gods are only different names of "that which is One"-more than hinting at a dim, underlying MONOTHEISM. There is no doubt that the purer and

more abstract conceptions could be traced to the later of the many centuries which it took to evolve the Rig-Veda in its final form, if we but had a sure key to its chronology; as it is, we have only, as in the Avesta, the internal evidence that goes so far in the hands of trained criticism, to support and guide our impressions, our conjectures. But one thing appears sure: Vedic religion at no time, until opened to alien and grosser influences, was idolatrous. In this respect the Aryas of India were in no wise behind their brethren of Erân: nature was their temple; they did not invite the deity to dwell in houses of men's building, and if, in their poetical effusions, they described their Devas in human form and with fanciful symbolical attributions, thereby unavoidably falling into anthropomorphism, they do not seem to have transferred it into reproductions more materially tangible than the spoken word-into the eidolon (portraiture,—of limner's, sculptor's, or potter's hand) -which becomes the idol.

3. And if the Rig-Veda may be shown to contain the germs of most of the religions and even philosophical systems which subsequently covered the spiritual soil of India with crops of such bewildering luxuriancy, the main character of this book of books, in nearly half its mantras,-answering, no doubt, to the earlier and main period of their composition and collection, is simple and easy to define; at this earliest and unalloyed stage, the religion which we see faithfully mirrored in them is NATURALISM, pure and simple, i. e., the worship of the Powers of Nature as Beings, generally beneficent, with only a very

few absolutely Evil Ones, such as Darkness and Drought; these latter, however, are not worshipped, nor even propitiated, but unconditionally abhorred by men, fought and conquered by the Powers of Good. In this unalloyed naturalism, we can watch the birth of myths and catch it, so to speak, in the act, by the simple proceeding of translating the names of each divine or semi-divine being as it confronts us in an invocation or in a bit of story (for long and especially connected and consistent stories are the works of a later, elaborating, and compiling age). We then perceive, to our astonishment, that they are not names at all, but either matter-of-fact common nouns, direct designations of the natural object under consideration, or else a verbal noun expressing some characteristic action of that object— as "the Pounders," "the Howlers," names of the Storm-Winds-or an adjective, a more or less ornate epithet, describing one or other of its characteristic properties or aspects. So that, by merely dismissing the capital initials, we reduce an incipient story -a primary myth containing all the live germs of future poetic and legendary development-into a fanciful, poetical description of a natural phenomenon-like the various stages of the sun's progress, the incidents of a thunderstorm, the dramatic episodes of a drought. Special illustrations of these positions are scarcely needed here, since all the following pages will, in a measure, consist of such illustrations. But, before we investigate the Vedic natural pantheon, it may not be amiss to repeat the definition of the word MYTH given in another vol

ume,' because it should be borne in mind through all the study on which we are entering, and will be found to cover each single case subjected to it. This it is: "A myth means simply a phenomenon of nature presented not as the result of a law, but as the act of divine or at least superhuman persons, good or evil powers. Reading and practice will show that there are many kinds of myths, but there is none which, if properly taken to pieces, thoroughly traced and cornered, will not be covered by this definition." The beauty of the Vedic myths is that they need no cornering, no taking to pieces, mostly being themselves embryonic, and resolving themselves, at a touch, back into the natural elements out of which they directly emanated, without as yet materializing into any such flesh-and-blood reality as, say, the biography of a Greek god.

4. We shall never know exactly what the inheritance was which the Aryas of the Sapta-Sindhavah

received from the time-the so-called Indo-Eranian period before the separation of the two sister races, the original material out of which grew the Rig-Veda. But there are some large primary conceptions in it which clearly confront us in the Zend-Avesta also, and which we are therefore justified in ascribing to the original, primeval Âryas, the ancestors of both. We may be tolerably well assured that so much of these primary conceptions as we can trace in the Rig-Veda unalloyed with elements betokening local Indian conditions and influences, represents the

1 See Story of Chaldea, p. 294, and Ch. VII, (on Myths) generally, which should be carefully re-read,