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APPENDIX.
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all the impersonations employed by the rishis in their sacred poetry. Quite a large number of these personifications become intelligible with the aid of the details given in the Puranas ; and, although it is not usually permissible to read the statements of a later work into an earlier one, it cannot be denied that the Puranic descriptions of the Vedic gods and goddesses are merely enlargements of their original conceptions in the Vedas. It is also to be borne in mind that the cessation of the worship of Vedic gods—Indra, Varuna, and the like-- is also indicative of the fact that it was due to the discovery of their true nature, so that when people discovered them to be pure personifications of mental abstractions they desisted from the worship which used to be performed for their propitiation. Probably the key to the interpretation of the Vedas and the character of Vedic gods was never completely lost sight of, however much the laity and even the ordinary brahmanas and sådhus might have remained ignorant of its existence. The wave of intellectualism, which followed the reaction against sacrificial ritualism of the Brahmana period, seems, towards its end, to have been characterised by a too free use of this key. A whole host of gods and goddesses, whose number has been estimated at 330,000,000, thus sprang from the original and limited Vedic stock in the Epic and the Puranic periods. A few additional personifications, such as that of Krishna, also seem to have been made by the authors of Hindu Puranas. It is, however, only fair to add that, while the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and the Puranas also, introduced a lot of confusion in history by
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