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The Beginnings of Hindu TheosoPhy 231

agents. The gods, too, we must not forget, have taken, very mechanically, ﬁxed positions in the ritual devoted to their service. One thing is certain, in the host of ﬁgures that crowd the canvass in the transition period from mythology to theosophy the nature gods play no real role. They are, if not ex— actly abandoned, at least relegated to a subordinate position and treated with comparative coldness. Every embodiment of the divine idea is now abstract or symbolic. The higher forms of early Hindu re- ligion operate decidedly from the ontological side, from the severely intellectual side. Faith and piety, sentiment and emotion, right and wrong, invariably take the second place, as long as there is to settle the question of the universe, the great cosmos; man, the little cosmos; time; space; causality. There- fore, perhaps, the plastic possibilities of the early gods through poetry, legend, and the art of repro- duction remain in India a coarse-grained exercise of second rate power: one needs but to call up for comparison the part that Greek mythology plays in Greek literature and art.

It is interesting to test this on the person of one great nature god of the early time. We have seen that in a very early prehistoric time, the common period of the Hindus and Iranians, there existed a high View of the gods as moral forces, as the omni~