Page:The Land of the Veda.djvu/95

Rh with the popular forms of the two latter, Krishna and the Linga, and all the manifestations of the bride of Mahadeva certainly were utterly unknown to the primitive texts of the religion of the Hindoos.

The Rig-Veda Sanhita (a complete copy of which is before us as we write) was translated from the original Sanscrit by Horace H. Wilson, and published in English in four volumes, the first being issued in 1850, and the last in 1866. The learned Introduction which the translator attached to the first volume, and an extensive and discriminating notice in the Calcutta Review for 1859, assist us in our description of these venerable writings.

The Rig-Veda is a miscellaneous collection of hymns. Each hymn is called a Sukta. The whole work is divided into eight books, or Ashtakas. Each Ashtaka is subdivided into eight Adhyayas, or chapters, containing an arbitrary number of Suktas. The whole number of hymns in the Rig-Veda is about a thousand. Each Sukta has for its reputed author a Rishi, or inspired teacher, by whom, in Brahminical phraseology, it has been originally seen, that is, to whom it was revealed; the Vedas being, according to mythological fictions, the uncreated dictation of Brahma. Each hymn is addressed to some deity or deities.

Who are the gods to whom the prayers and praises are addressed? Here we find a striking difference between the mythology of the Rig-Veda and that of the heroic poems and Puranas, which come so long after them. The divinities worshiped are not unknown to later systems, but they there perform very subordinate parts, while those deities who are the great gods—the Dii Majores—of the subsequent and present period, are either wholly unnamed in the Veda, or are noticed in an inferior and different capacity. The names of Shiva, of Mahadeva, of Durga, of Kali, of Rama, of Krishna, never occur, and there is not the slightest allusion to the form in which, for the last ten centuries at least, Shiva seems to have been almost exclusively worshiped in India, that of the Linga or Phallus; neither is there any hint of another important feature of later Hindooism, the Trimurti, or Triune combination of