The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c11.s4.1

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.