The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c7.64

c7.64

We can realise this to some extent by calling up another mythology, that of the Greeks. This is also based upon nature, but nature is soon forgotten, or, if not entirely forgotten, much obscured by after-born movements. Owing to a curious slip, fortunate from the artistic side, unfortunate from the religious and mythical side, Greek mythology fell too completely into the hands of the people. Poets, artists, and even philosophers handle it, each in their own way. But there is a notable absence of those Rishis of the Veda who, with all their too human sordidness and all their Hindu fancifulness see the great realities of the world with their eyes wide open, and work their way slowly but with secure touch from the single and separate manifestations of nature in the Rig-Veda to the absolute One Being which is nature as a whole, that is the idea of unity as finally settled in the Upanishads. The finest flower of Greek mythology, great Zeus, of whom Hesiod says, πάντα ἰδὼν ὀφθαλμὸς καὶ πάντα νοήσας, "The eye of Zeus which sees all and knows all," or of whom the old Orphic hymn sings, Ζεὺς ἀρχή, Ζεὺς μέσσα, Διὸς δ᾽ἐκ πάντα τέτυκται, "Zeus is the beginning, Zeus is the middle, on Zeus all is founded," is at the same time the flippant, breezy Jove to whom the poets ascribe foibles and vices barely excusable in a modern bon-vivant and man about town. Too finished personification causes the break-down of Greek mythology even from the artistic side. The same poets in whom we praise above all aversion to everything excessive or monstrous, those Greek poets who in general fancy and say just enough, but not too much, run a close race with the most extravagant fancies of semi-civilised peoples in the description of their primeval gods. Uranos was maimed by his own son, Kronos; Kronos, the unnatural son, is also an unnatural father. For he swallows his own children, and, after years of tentative but unsuccessful digestion, vomits forth the whole brood. Fair Phoebus Apollo hangs Marsyas on a tree and flays him alive. Homicide without end, parricide and murder of children are the stock events of their mythology. No wonder that Plato banished even the Homeric poems from his ideal republic. And Epicurus had to say: “The gods are indeed, but they are not as many believe them to be. Not he is an infidel who denies the gods of the many, but he that fastens upon the gods the opinions of the many.” Nothing so much as the complete humanisation of Greek mythology paved the way for the rapid spread of that Shemitic religion, deeply ethical in its teachings, Judaeo-Christianity, among the Indo-European peoples.