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R[=a]m[=a]yana, come from Vishnuism. Çivaism has nothing to compare with this, except in the works of them that pretend to be Çivaites but are really not sectaries, like the Sittars and the author of the Cvet[=a]cvatara. Çiva as a 'patron of literature' takes just the place taken by Ganeça in the present beginning of the Mah[=a]bh[=a]rata. Vy[Fa]sa has here composed the poem[42] but Ganeça is invoked as Vighneça, 'Lord of difficulties,' to help the poet write it out. Vy[=a]sa does the intellectual work and Ganeça performs the manual labor. Vishnuism, in a word, is the only cultivated (native) sectarian religion of India; and the orthodox cult, in that it is Vedantic, lies nearer to Vishnuism than to Çivaism. Why then does one find Çiva invoked by philosophy? Because monotheism in distinction from pantheism was the belief of the wise in the first centuries after the Christian era, till the genius of Çankara definitively raised pantheism in alliance with orthodoxy to be the more esteemed; and because Çiva alone, when the choice lay between him and Vishnu, could be selected as the One God. For Vishnuism was now merged with Krishnaism, a new vulgar cult, and Çiva was an old and venerated god, long since a member of the Brahmanic pantheon. The connection between Çivaism and the S[Fa]nkhya system gave it a more respectable and archaic appearance in the eyes of the conservative Brahman, while the original asceticism of Çiva undoubtedly appealed much more to Brahmanic feeling than did the sentimentalism of the Vishnuite. In the extreme North, in the ninth century, philosophy and Civaism are nominally allied, but really sectarian Çivaism was the cult of the lowest, not of the highest classes. Many of the professed Çivaites are to-day tending to Vedantism, which is the proper philosophy of the Vishnuite; and the Civaite sects are waning before the Vishnuite power, not only in the middle North, where the mass of the population is devoted to Vishnu, but even in Civa's later provinces in the extreme South. The social distribution of the sectaries in the Middle Ages was such that one may assign older Vishnuism to the middle classes, and Çivaism to the highest on its philosophical and decently ascetic side, but to the lowest on its phallic and magical side.
But none of the Civate sects we have mentioned, imbecile as appear to be the impostors that represent them, are equal in despicable traits to the ÇI=a]ktas. These worshippers of the androgynous Çiva (or of Çakti, the female principle alone), do,
