Page:Myths of the Hindus & Buddhists.djvu/39

The Attraction of the Animal subordinate. The emblem thus constituted will mark a compromise, a synthesis of two systems, two ideas—one relatively new, and one incomparably older and more primitive. For the same process that makes the Tenth Book of the Rig-Veda so markedly different from its predecessors, inasmuch as in it the religious consciousness of the Sanskrit-speaking people has begun to take note of the indigenous conceptions of the peoples of the soil, is characteristic of the advancing consciousness of Hinduism throughout the historic period. The Aryan brain, with its store of great nature-gods—gods of sky and sun and fire, of wind and waters and storm, gods who had so much in common with each other, throughout Aryan mythology, from the Hellespont to the Ganges—had gradually to recognize and include the older, vaguer, more dimly cosmic deities of various Asiatic populations. The process of this is perfectly clear and traceable historically. Only the rival elements themselves have to be assumed and enumerated. Of the growth of the mythology of Indra and Agni, of Vāyu and Varuna we can say very little. In all probability it was born outside India, and brought there, as to Greece, in a state of maturity. And similarly, we cannot trace the steps by which the Indian imagination came to conceive of the universe, or the god of the universe, as the Elephant-headed. Obviously, the idea was born in India itself, where the elephants ranged the forests and breasted the rivers. The appearance of the same worship in such countries as China and Japan is clearly a relic of some very ancient religious influence brought to bear upon them from the far south. 17