Page:Monier Monier-Williams - Indian Wisdom.djvu/63

 it wonderful that these mighty agencies should have been at first poetically personified, and afterwards, when invested with forms, attributes, and individuality, worshipped as distinct gods. It was only natural, too, that a varying supremacy and varying honours should have been accorded to each deified force—to the air, the rain, the storm, the sun, or fire—according to the special atmospheric influences to which particular localities were exposed, or according to the seasons of the year when the dominance of each was to be prayed for or deprecated.

This was the religion represented in the Vedas and the primitive creed of the In do-Aryans about twelve or thirteen centuries before Christ. The first forces deified seem to have been those manifested in the sky and air. These were at first generalized under one rather vague personification, as was natural in the earliest attempts at giving shape to religious ideas. For it may be obseived that all religious systems, even the most polytheistic, have generally grown out of some undefined original belief in a divine power or powers controlling and regulating the universe. And although innumerable gods and goddesses, gifted with a thousand shapes, now crowd the Hindu Pantheon, appealing to the instincts of the unthinking millions whose capacity for religious ideas is supposed to require the aid of external symbols, it is probable that there existed for the first Aryan worshippers a simpler theistic creed : even as the thoughtful Hindu of the present day looks through the maze of his mythology to the conception of one divine self-existing being, one all-pervading spirit, into whose unity all visible symbols are gathered, and in whose essence all entities are comprehended.

In the Veda this unity soon diverged into various ramifications. Only a few of the hymns appear to contain the ample conception of one divine self-existent omnipresent Being, and even in these the idea of one God