The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c4.5

c4.5

3. These delegates—one from each Institution or myth and ceremony. The reader of these pages will, I hope, learn to his satisfaction how the religion of the Veda rests upon a prehistoric foundation which is largely nature myth; how it continues in the Rig-Veda hymns as hieratic ritual worship of polytheistic gods; how this religion grew more and more formal and mechanical in the Yajur-Vedas and Brāhmaṇas, until it was practically abandoned; how and when arose the germs of higher religious thought; and, finally, how the motives and principles that underlie this entire chain of mental events landed Hindu thought, at a comparatively early period, in the pantheistic and pessimistic religion of the Upanishads which it has never again abandoned.