that a rite so important as to force its way into the Brahminical ritual, and to cause them to allow women to play so conspicuous a part, could have been artificially altered in date.

We may, therefore, adhere to the view that the Mahavrata is a ritual of the Winter solstice, and that it combines within itself the characteristics of a spell to procure the heat of the sun and the fall of rain, so as to bring about fertility for the land, while more directly still it is designed to stimulate human and animal productiveness. In view of the early date of the rite—and already in the Taittiriya Samhita and the Kāṭhaka Samhita it is clearly recognised and so cannot be dated later than the eighth century B.C.-it is of considerable interest that it contains no trace of a vegetation spirit such as can be found in ancient Mediterranean rituals, and this fact renders us entitled to be cautious before necessarily assuming that all these vegetation and fertility spells involved the conception of a vegetation spirit, an idea not readily verified in the other Vedic texts. No doubt in the later Hindu religion among its strange characteristics are many which depend on the idea of a vegetation spirit, but in such cases non-Aryan influence is certainly at work, either adding a new aspect of religious thought or bringing into the foreground an aspect which for some reason or another was not prominent in the mass of conceptions which may be termed Vedic religion.1

1 The original authorities are, Aitareya Āraṇyaka, i and v; Śānkhāyana Aranyaka, i and ii; Taittiriya Samhita, vii, 5, 9 and 10; Taittiriya Brāhmaṇa, i, 2, 6; Kathaka Samhita, xxxiv, 5; Tandya Mahābrāhmaṇa, v, 5, 6; Sankhāyana Śrauta Sutra, xvii and xviii; Lāṭyāyana Śrauta Sūtra, iii, 10 – iv, 3; Kātyāyana Śrauta Sūtra, xiii, 3.