The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c10.63

c10.63

Every onward movement of Hindu thought takes place at the expense of the old gods of nature; the divine attribute becomes more important than the mythological person. The individual natural history of the gods becomes a thing of minor interest. In this sense polytheism is decadent even in the hymns of the Rig-Veda themselves. It shows signs of going to seed for philosophy. The gods in turn perform about the same feats of creating and upholding the world: the interest of the poets in the acts has evidently increased at the expense of the 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 rôle. They are, if not exactly 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 religion 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. Therefore, perhaps, the plastic possibilities of the early gods through poetry, legend, and the art of reproduction 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.