The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c17.175

v1.c17.175

Vishṇu cannot be said to have won any such assured place as Rudra, who is already hailed as the ‘great god’ *par excellence*, and already bears the name of Çiva, ‘propitious,’ which is to be his final appellation. But the constant identification of Vishṇu and the sacrifice is, in view of the extraordinary importance attached to the sacrifice by the Brāhmans, a sure sign that he counted for much in Vedic life, and that he shared with Rudra the veneration of the people, who may in different localities have been the followers of one or the other god respectively. For the rest, while we now obtain many details of the lower side of the religion in the spells of the Atharvaveda, the pantheon of the Rigveda remains unaltered save in such minor aspects as the new prominence of the Apsarasas, the mechanical opposition of the gods and the Asuras, and the rise of snake worship, which seems to have been due to the imitation of the aboriginal tribes. On the other hand, the attitude of the priests to the gods as revealed in the sacrifice has lost whatever it had of spontaneity and simple piety. It is no doubt possible to exaggerate these qualities even in the earlier hymns of the Rigveda; but their absence in the later Saṃhitās is unquestionable. The theory of sacrifice is bluntly *do ut des*; and even in that theory the sacrificers had so little trust that the whole sacrificial apparatus is dominated by sympathetic magic. So convinced is the priest of his powers in this regard that the texts explain that he can ruin as he pleases, by errors in the sacrifice deliberately committed, the patron for whom he is acting, and in whose interest he is presumed to be at work. It is a sordid picture; and, as we have seen, the higher spirits turned away from a hocus pocus, which they must have despised as heartily as any Buddhist, to the interpretation of the reality underlying phenomena. Yet it is characteristic of the Indian genius that, though it evolved views which must have rendered all the sacrificial technique logically of no avail, it made no effort to break with the sacrifice which was allowed to stand as a preliminary towards the attainment of that enlightenment which the priests professed to impart.