The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c7.63

c7.63

And yet the poetry of the Rig-Veda is, in a deeper sense, original. It is primitive religious poetry, if by primitive we mean uninterrupted contact with the last source of its inspiration. The final judgment of its character, after all, depends not so much upon the economic motives, or the all-around personal character of its authors as upon the extent and quality of their mental vision. To treat sacrificial themes in the high poetic way seems to most of us hollow mockery. But we must not forget that such performances, to some extent, continue the pious ways of the fathers; that the acts in part symbolise real religious feeling; and that most religions have a trick of throwing a poetic and sentimental glamor around practices that are trivial intrinsically. Then the difference of standards in a semi-barbarous time, such as the time of the Rig-Veda, must count for something. After all that I have said to forefend what may be called a padded or swollen estimate of Rig-Veda poetry and religion, both the poetry and the religion are of singular interest and importance. In its essence the Rig-Veda is not liturgy but mythology. Its priest-poets, in their heart of hearts, are not mere technicians, but tense observers of the great facts and acts of nature, and worshippers of the powers whom they fancy at work in nature. In fact they are both poets and philosophers. There is in this matter some real cause for surprise. We must not forget the long, almost indefinite past of Hindu mythology and religion. I shall endeavor to make this clear in the next lecture when we come to deal with the reconstructions of comparative mythology. There was plenty of time for all nature-worship to have stiffened into mere admiration, fear, and adulation of personal gods, accompanied inevitably by a more or less complete forgetfulness of the forces in nature from which sprang the gods. That this was not so is due, in my opinion, to the vast impressiveness of India's nature. Its fiercely glowing sun, its terrible yet life-giving monsoons, the snow-mountain giants of the north, and its bewilderingly profuse vegetation could hardly fail to keep obtruding themselves as a revelation of the powers of the already existing gods. What is still more important, it could hardly fail to stimulate the creation of new nature-gods to a degree unknown elsewhere. It is this unforgetting adherence to nature that has made the Vedic hymns the training-school of the Science of Mythology, and to a large extent also of the Science of Religion. Deprived of the hymns of the Rig-Veda, we should hardly know to this day that mythology is the first and fundamental adjustment of the individual human life to the outer active, interfering, dynamic world, which surrounds and influences man from the moment when he opens his eyes upon the wonders of its unexplained phenomena. In this sense Vedic mythology is in its day what empirical science is in our day.