What concerns us most is the religious thought -- on soul and God and all that appertains to religion. We will take the Samhitas. These are collections of hymns forming,as it were,the oldest Aryan literature, properly speaking,the oldest literature in the world. There may have been some scraps of literature of older date here and there,older than that even, but not books,or literature properly so called. As a collected book, this is the oldest the world has,and herein is portrayed the earliest feeling of the Aryans,their aspirations,the questions that arose about their manners and methods,and so on. At the very outset we find a very curious idea. These hymns are sung in praise of different gods, Devas as they are called, the bright ones. There is quite a number of them.

One is called Indra, another Varuna,another Mitra, Parjanya,and so on. Various mythological and allegorical figures come before us one after the other -- for instance, Indra the thunderer, striking the serpent who has withheld the rains from mankind. Then he lets fly his thunderbolt,the serpent is killed,and rain comes down in showers. The people are pleased,and they worship Indra with oblations. They make a sacrificial pyre,kill some animals,roast their flesh upon spits, and offer that meat to Indra.

And they had a popular plant called Soma. What plant it was nobody knows now; it has entirely disappeared,but from the books we gather that, when crushed, it produced a sort of milky juice, and that was fermented; and it can also be gathered that this fermented Soma juice was intoxicating. This also they offered to Indra and the other gods,and they also drank it themselves. Sometimes they drank a little too much,and so did the gods. Indra on occasions got drunk. There are passages to show that Indra at one time drank so much of this Soma juice that he talked irrelevant words. So with Varuna. He is another god, very powerful,and is in the same way protecting his votaries, and they are praising him with libations of Soma. So is the god of war, and so on.

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