Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c12.177

c12.177

To the nature of the religion administered by such a priesthood some of the Harappā relics give us clues. The numerous clay figurines of women suggest that, as in Baluchistan, there was some form of worship of a Mother-Goddess in which these figures played their part in household shrines, and there is a sealing which bears a representation of a female from whose womb a plant issues, and suggests the idea of an earth-goddess concerned with vegetation. Such goddesses are common in the Hinduism of the countryside today - the gramadevatas of many a rustic shrine; the priests, significantly enough, are not the Brahmins, whose authority dates back to the Aryan invasion of the middle of the first millennium B.C., but outcastes who still know the ways of the gods before the gods.