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 I"8 The Religion of the Veda

is lifted entirely above doubt. I have endeavored to give a conservative estimate of the varying inter.— pretations, as free from fanciful exaggeration of the probabilities as it is from unwholesome scepticism.

We may now turn to the second great sphere of Indoulranian mythology. It deals with the ﬁrst men and sacriﬁcers, and the same-viiquor, the most distinguished sacriﬁce to the gods.

One of the duties of primitive man as he grows into the irksome habit of looking for the reason of things is to ﬁnd a reason for himself. He does not take himself for granted, but assumes that he orig- inated from something or other. This is as a rule not as easy as it is in the myth of Deucalion. All that he had to do was to throw stones, the bones of Mother Earth, behind him, and, behold, there were men. The abstract benevolent Divinity turning himself into a creative Father God is not always at hand; he does not on the whole represent a very primitive form of thought, certainly not in India. An important and widespread conception, partly religious in character, is Totemism. This is founded on the belief that the human race, or, more fro- quently, that given clans and families derive their descent from animals: tote-mic names like “Bear” and “Wolf” carry traces of this sort of belief into our time. This particular question is a splendid