The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c8.6

v1.c8.6

The collection must have been made from a considerable area of country, for it contains hymns emanating from very varied families. Tradition ascribes to books ii to vii as authors the seers Gautama, Viçvāmitra, Vāmadeva, Atri, Bharadvāja, and Vasiṣṭha, but this view cannot be taken quite literally: the hymns themselves reveal abundant evidence that, for the most part at least, they were not composed by these personages, but by men claiming to be of the families bearing their names, and the family character of the hymns in these books is in the main clear. With these six books must be classed the groups of hymns ascribed to different families or authors in book i, 51–191, and this may have been the extent of the oldest collection made, though it is perhaps more likely that i. 51–191 were collected later than ii–vii. The earlier portion of book i and the whole of book viii are ascribed to seers of the Kaṇva family; it would appear that these two separate collections were at some time added, the one in front of, and the other after, the existing Saṁhitā, but which addition was first made there is no clear ground to show.¹ When the collection had reached the compass of seven or eight books, another, now the ninth, was created by extracting from the other books all the hymns addressed to Soma Pavamāna, that is the Soma as it was poured through the filter, which were then united into one group: for this change no reason is obvious.² This did not, however, end the history of the collection: at a time when the nine books had already taken form, a tenth was added, consisting on the whole of more recent hymns.³ The late character of this book can be established by a number of proofs. Its extent, 191 hymns, has obviously been brought up to that of book i; the language shows development in different aspects: hiatus becomes rarer, old words like the particle *sīm* disappear, new words and forms are found, and the metre shows affinities with the metre of the later Saṁhitās. The same result is indicated by the new features in religion which appear: the Dawn, the most poetic of Indian goddesses, all but disappears, Varuṇa, most moral and spiritual of Vedic deities, loses in position, while Indra, the Indian god *par excellence*, and Agni, the priestly god of fire, retain all their importance. The more or less abstract conception of the All-gods increases in importance, and real abstract deities appear in Faith and Wrath. The growth of religious thought is also shown by the occurrence of philosophical and cosmogonic hymns, and in imitation of the hymns to the gods the wedding and funeral services are now provided with elaborate hymnologies in place of the more simple formulae which were doubtless earlier in use.⁴ The book shows also the employment of hymns for spells and incantations, and here again we must doubtless see the application to the lower side of life of the instrument devised primarily to placate the high gods. The advance in religion is paralleled by the advance in society: in this book we for the first time meet the fully developed system of the four castes or classes, Brahman, warrior, clansman, and Çūdra.