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mystification, should hesitate also to accept at their face value such historical notes as have been drafted by the same priestly hand.
Nor would we confine the application of this principle to the output of extant Brahmanic works. The same truth cuts right and left among many utterances of the Vedic seers and all the theories built upon them. To pick out here and there an ipse dixit of one of the later fanciful Vedic poets, who lived in a period as Brahmanic (that is, as ritualistic) as is that which is represented by the actual ritual-texts, and attempt to reconstruct the original form of divinities on the basis of such vagaries is useless, for it is an unhistorical method which ignores ancient conditions.
In less degree, because here the conditions are more obvious, does this apply to the religious interpretation of the great body of literature which has conserved for posterity the beginnings of Hinduism. But upon this we have already animadverted, and now need only range this literature in line with its predecessors. Not because the epic pictures Krishna as making obeisance to Çiva is Krishna here the undeveloped mangod, who represents but the beginning of his (later) greatness, and is still subject to the older Çiva. On the contrary, it is the epic's last extravagance in regard to Çiva (who has already bowed before the great image of Krishna-Vishnu) that demands a furious counter-blast against the rival god. It is the Çivaite who says that Krishna-Vishnu bows; and because it is the Çivaite, and because this is the national mode of expression of every sectary, therefore what the Civaite says is in all probability historically false, and the sober historian will at least not discover the earlier Krishna' in the Krishna portrayed by his rival's satellites.
But when one comes to the modern sects, then he has to deplore not so much the lack of historical data as the grotesque form into which this same over-vivid imagination of the Hindu has builded his gods. As the scientific systems grow more and more fancifully, detailed, and as the liturgy flowers out into the most extraordinary bloom of weird legend, so the images of the gods, to the eye in their temples, to the mind in the descriptions of them, take to themselves the most uncouth details imagined by a curious
