Page:Stories of India's Gods & Heroes.djvu/11

Rh and sun, thunder and rain: all these and many lesser natural phenomena were worshipped under one name or another. And these hymns, as may be imagined, are full of every sort of myth and fancy drawn from the various manifestations of God in Nature.

As time goes on, we find, on the one hand, attempts to discover some foundation underlying this simple Nature-worship, to ask deeper questions on the problems of religion; and, on the other, new stories about the old gods, and new gods coming to join the ranks of the others, all with a strong tendency to exaggeration and to many things resembling and, unhappily, far surpassing in impropriety the grosser features of the Greek mythology.

While none of our stories are drawn wholly from the Veda, some of the characters mentioned in this book appear more or less frequently in the hymns. Vasishtha and Viswamitra are supposed to have written some of them; traces of the Urvasi myth appear; and many of the gods of whom we shall hear are mentioned, though the position they occupied in Vedic days changed, in many cases, as time went on.

Passing over a large mass of important literature attached to the Vedas—though some of it contains a great deal of matter similar to that from which our tales are drawn—we should notice next the great Epics of India, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The former deals with the South of India, the latter with the North. The word Ramayana simply means "Story of Rama," a