The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c11.s4: § 4. The Mingling of Races and Cultures
The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c11.s4
- Language
- English
§ 4. The Mingling of Races and Cultures
v1.c11.s4.1
Modern views of the religion of Indo-European peoples are strongly influenced by recognition of the fact that race mixture must be assumed to have been an important factor in the development of the religions of the historic peoples such as the Greeks and the Romans. The view that Greek religion is a real representative of a primitive Indo-European religion has been necessarily abandoned, when it is realized that the lands occupied by the Greeks were already the scene of a great and energetic civilization, which cannot be supposed to have left no trace in the beliefs of the invaders, apart altogether from the fact that the physical type of the invaders may have been seriously modified by the intermixture. Similarly, just as the religion of the Homeric poems has been treated as belonging to a small invading aristocracy, so the religion of Rome as revealed to us in the Calendar of Numa in its sanity and moderation has been held to be the work of invaders superimposing a higher faith on the lower form of belief which existed formerly, a view which Dr. Warde Fowler now inclines to favour,⁵ urging in support the fact that we find a curious contrast between the orderly and decorous Parentalia as a festival of the dead in February and the Lemuria in May, which seems to have been a somewhat savage rite of the banning of ghosts. The latter he deems to have belonged to the primitive population, and to have been taken over by the framers of the Calendar of Numa in the desire to restrict the rite within due limits, and so to diminish the disorderly character of the more ancient belief which was too deeply rooted in the popular mind to be ignored entirely. Nor, of course, is there any doubt that mixture of religious beliefs has often taken place: recently a very ingenious theory¹ of the complication of early Australian religion has been put forward, based on the view that the religion of these people has been influenced by small bodies of invaders, who have visited the land from time to time but have failed to establish themselves or introduce in a lasting way a higher culture.
v1.c11.s4.2
⁵ *Religious Experience of the Roman People*, pp. viii, 393. For Greece, see Lang, *The World of Homer* (1910). Cf., for the Celts, Rhys, *Celtic Heathendom*, pp. 105 f.
v1.c11.s4.3
¹ *Rivers, Essays and Studies presented to W. Ridgeway*, p. 480. Cf. his *History of Melanesian Society* (1914), ii. 357 ff.
v1.c11.s4.4
But, while in principle the theory of the effect of race mixture as producing religious phenomena is perfectly valid, it is of the utmost difficulty to make effective use of it in any examination of an actual religion. Prof. Ridgeway has laid stress on the failure of students of Vedic religion to emphasize the distinction between the faith of the invader as revealed in the Rigveda, and that of the aborigine as revealed in the Atharvaveda. A similar theory of the effect of the aboriginal population on the Aryan invaders has been in the development of the Sanskrit language: it has been urged that the development of Prākritie speeches is due entirely to the inability of the conquered population to reproduce precisely the speech of the invaders.² The theory in both cases is tempting, but the logical difficulties of applying it effectively are very great. In the first place we have no standard of comparison by which we can discriminate between the higher and lower elements in religion: what appears to us to be higher is and must be determined by our conceptions of religion, and as conceptions of religion vary as much to-day as ever, it is impossible for us confidently to hold that one form was higher than another. If, in the second place, we take the religion of Homer and set it up as a standard of true Indo-European religion, we are obviously making a completely unproved assumption, and one which can be rendered doubtful by reference to the poems themselves, which here and there contain hints of the lower side of religion, and more primitive beliefs, which can only purely arbitrarily be assigned to the subject population. Further difficulties manifest themselves, when it is sought to find out what was the racial character of this subject population: in the case of Rome, Prof. Ridgeway sees the Ligures,³ but Dr. Binder a Latin people,⁴ and the Latins cannot be denied the right to rank as Indo-Europeans. Similarly in the case of Greece: it is quite impossible to believe that the Achaeans were the first Indo-Europeans to enter Greece: the Ionians and many other tribes were doubtless there before them,⁵ and there must therefore have been mixture of race and religion before the Achaeans.
v1.c11.s4.5
² Petersen, *JAOS.* xxxii. 414 ff. Cf. Keith, *Cambridge Hist. of India*, i. 109.
v1.c11.s4.6
³ *Who were the Romans?* (*Proceedings of British Academy*, 1908–9.)
v1.c11.s4.7
⁴ *Die Plebs*.
v1.c11.s4.8
⁵ Kretschmer, *Glotta*, i. 9 ff.; Farnell, *Cults of the Greek States*, iv. 155 ff.
v1.c11.s4.9
Difficulties are also presented by the theory of Prof. Murray which admits that the Achaeans at one time were the possessors of an inferior form of religion, so that there is no question of the introduction of a high type of Indo-European religion, but that, in the course of their journeys from the north to Greece, they had laid aside much of this primitive barbarism. But, once we admit that they at one time were addicted to this lower religion, it becomes very difficult to distinguish between the remnants of this former state which they brought with them, and the results of contact with the same primitive religion in an unchanged condition. The problem is rendered more easy for Prof. Murray in that he accepts the view that the Homeric poems were made refined and freed from the primitive beliefs which they at one time evinced by deliberate remodelling in the sixth century B. C. and subsequently, but this wild theory can hardly be taken seriously.
v1.c11.s4.10
Again, much reliance has been put on the mode of disposal of the dead as a sign of change of belief and of race. But, though it is often regarded as obvious that a change from burial to burning must accompany a new view of the dead, it is quite impossible to prove anything of the kind: neither the theory that changes of culture denote change of race, nor the view that change of culture has nothing to do with change of race, though both have distinguished exponents, has any real validity as a general proposition.¹ There is, however, much primitive evidence that burial and burning were means of disposing of the dead adopted by peoples without change of culture or recorded change of belief: thus the primitive neolithic tribes of Britain both buried and burned their dead, as did also the tribes of Tasmania, and the Romans in those periods of which we have records. Moreover it is probable that burial was always regarded as the normal and more primitive way: at least the fact that in the Rigveda burial seems to be contemplated as quite normal, and that in the later ritual, when burning was normal for all save sages and children under two years of age, it was considered proper to bury the bones left from the burning, stands in curious accord with the rule in Rome by which the burial of one bone was normal despite the burning of the body. The evidence in fact leaves the impression that it is quite impossible to treat burial and burning of the dead as marks of racial distinction: indeed it is not even possible to treat the two modes as indicating a different view of the position of the dead in every case: the Rigveda treats the two principles as one, and it has been argued that the same meaning must be seen even in Greek religion, where the distinction of burning and burial has been generally held to be fundamental as indicating change of race and religious belief alike.²
v1.c11.s4.11
¹ Cf. Dieterich, *Mutter Erde*, p. 66. Helm (*Altgerm. Rel.* i. 153 ff.) insists that in Germany the change, manifesting an increasing fear of the proximity of the dead, is due to foreign influence; he rejects Babylon as the ultimate source (with Ed. Meyer, *Zeitschrift für Ethnol.*, 1905, p. 296) against von Schroeder (*Arische Religion*, i. 260).
v1.c11.s4.12
² Lawson, *Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion*, chaps. v and vi; Fowler, *Religious Experience of the Roman People*, pp. 400, 401; Keith, *JRAS.* 1912, pp. 470–4; Meyer, *Gesch. des Alt.*³ I. ii. pp. 827, 863, 864, 893; Hopkins, *Origin of Religion*, pp. 148 ff.
v1.c11.s4.13
In the case of India we have further to face, as in that of Greece, but even more markedly, the absence of an early information as to the religion of the non-Aryan tribes. It is, of course, true that we may observe, and use observations earlier recorded of, the usages of the primitive tribes of India, but it would be absurd to claim that these represent the state attained by the non-Aryans¹ at the moment and the places where the Aryans came into contact with them. The material remains antedating the Hellenic invasions of Greece which shed a scanty light, pending the interpretation of the accompanying records, on pre-Hellenic religion are wanting in India, and the literary evidence of Dravidian religion comes far too late to enable us to state precisely what that religion was before the Aryans imprinted indelibly their influence on all higher religion in India. Whatever amount of Dravidian influence is to be traced on the religion of the Vedic texts,² it is certain that the epic already cannot be regarded as representing pure Aryan religion, and that indeed Dravidian influence may have been of great importance. By the epic period also we must make allowance, however, vaguely and uncertainly for the religious influences introduced by the hordes of invaders, Greek, Parthian, and Çaka from the north-west and still more perhaps for the contact of cultures, while in the Vedic period we are confronted with problems of Babylonian influence exercised either directly on India or on the Indo-Iranians, the possibilities of which have been largely increased by the discovery of Aryan deities in the records of the Mitanni.
v1.c11.s4.14
¹ Presumably a Dravidian or Muṇḍā speech. If they were totemists, which is uncertain (it is denied for the Todas by W. H. R. Rivers (*The Todas*, pp. 140 ff.) and for the Nāgas by T. C. Hodson, *The Naga Tribes of Manipur*, pp. 70 ff.), then they certainly did not seriously effect the Indo-Aryans in this regard.
v1.c11.s4.15
² Possibly the motive of fear as that of worship was made more prominent by this means: at any rate fear is apparently a dominant motive in modern India; Martin, *The Gods of India*, pp. 282 ff. Arbman (*Rudra*, p. 140) assumes, without proof, that we are to find very primitive ideas in Vedic religion, forgetting how far from primitive the Aryans were.
v1.c11.s4.16
The difficulty of decision as pre-Aryan or to foreign influences in any concrete case are admirably illustrated by the controversy as to the development of the Upaniṣad philosophy which has variously been claimed as the finest expression of the true Aryan spirit, and as fundamentally non-Aryan and in essence Dravidian.³ The controversy cannot be decided by any form of argument, for the simple reason that we have no external evidence of the true Aryan spirit, on the one hand, nor of the Dravidian prior to the date of the early Upaniṣads. Similarly we do not and cannot know definitely whether the use of idols was gradually introduced into Indian religion by borrowing from the Dravidians, or whether the ideas of asceticism, of caste, of transmigration came from them, or in what degree, for instance, Rudra was a Dravidian god. On these subjects speculation is possible, but it is necessary to recognize that beyond speculation in the great majority of cases we cannot possibly proceed, and the same remark applies to most of the efforts to trace Babylonian influences on Indian religion.
v1.c11.s4.17
³ Cf. G. W. Brown, *Studies in honor of Bloomfield*, pp. 75 ff.
Linked texts (2)
- Ṛgvedasaṃhitā — Sanskrit
- Atharvavedasaṃhitā — Atharvan & Aṅgiras, Sanskrit