Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/286

 Incidental descrip= tions of iva and ma in other poems. God as mother. The great war between Chandi and Mahis, 250 BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE. [ Chap. with Uma and their domestic life in detail. Such incidental descriptions of Civa and Uma are found in all the Chandi Mangalas, in the Ramayana by Krittivasa, in the Manasa Mangala by Vijay Gupta, and in many other old Bengali poems in which they might be least expected. This of course shows that they are relatively older. 4. The Sakta-cult and its development in Bengal. The idea of the femininity of God may have been characteristic of primitive Asiatic races—of Mongolians and Dravidians in particular, whose civilization, according to some scholars, preceded that of the Aryans. the pure creed of the Indo-Aryans before it had any In the Vedas which represent admixture of the religion of the primitive races of India,—we do not find any pronounced worship of god as mother. But the whole country was full of such worship and the Aryan settlers had erelong We find in the Tantras that some forms of the Sakta-cult were imported in- to recognise and adopt it. to the religious system of the Aryans from China.* The great war between Chandiand Mahisasir is said to have occurred inthe earliest part of the Satya- Yuga. The Hindus thus give it a date anterior to any event related in their own history, though there This fact is suggestive of the origin of the worship of the is no mention of this war in the Vedas. mother in a very primitive age and the non-mention of it in their earliest literature—the Vedas, only leads to the hypothesis, that it did not originally interest the Aryans.
 * In the Rudra-Yamala and other Hindu Tantras.