In regard to eschatology, as in regard to myths, it has been shown that the utmost caution in identification is called for.  It may be surmised that such or such a belief or legend is in origin one with a like faith or tale of other peoples.  But the question whether it be one in historical origin or in universal mythopoetic fancy, and this latter be the only common origin, must remain in almost every case unanswered[28].  This is by far not so entertaining, nor so picturesque a solution as is the explanation of a common historical basis for any two legends, with its inspiring ‘open sesame’ to the door of the locked past.  But which is truer?  Which accords more with the facts as they are collected from a wider field?  As man in the process of development, in whatever quarter of earth he be located, makes for himself independently clothes, language, and gods, so he makes myths that are more or less like those of other peoples, and it is only when names coincide and traits that are unknown elsewhere are strikingly similar in any two mythologies that one has a right to argue a probable community of origin.

But even if the legend of the flood were Babylonian, and the Asuras as devils were due to Iranian influence—­which can neither be proved nor disproved—­the fact remains that the Indian religion in its main features is of a purely native character.

As the most prominent features of the Vedic religion must be regarded the worship of soma of nature-gods that are in part already more than this, of spirits, and of the Manes; the acknowledgment of a moral law and a belief in a life hereafter.  There is also a vaguer nascent belief in a creator apart from any natural phenomenon, but the creed for the most part is poetically, indefinitely, stated:  ’Most wonder-working of the wonder-working gods, who made heaven and earth’(as above).  The corresponding Power is Cerus in Cerus-Creator (Kronos?), although when a name is given, the Maker, Dh[=a]tar, is employed; while Tvashtar, the artificer, is more an epithet of the sun than of the unknown creator.  The personification of Dh[=a]tar as creator of the sun, etc., belongs to later Vedic times, and foreruns the Father-god of the last Vedic period.  Not till the classical age (below) is found a formal identification of the Vedic nature-gods with the departed Fathers (Manes).  Indra, for example, is invoked in the Rig Veda to ’be a friend, be a father, be more fatherly than the fathers’;[29] but this implies no patristic side in Indra, who is called in the same hymn (vs. 4) the son of Dyaus (his father); and Dyaus Pitar no more implies, as say some sciolists, that Dyaus was regarded as a human ancestor than does ‘Mother Earth’ imply a belief that Earth is the ghost of a dead woman.

In the Veda there is a nature-religion and an ancestor-religion.  These approach, but do not unite; they are felt as sundered beliefs.  Sun-myths, though by some denied in toto, appear plainly in the Vedic hymns.  Dead heroes may be gods, but gods, too, are natural phenomena, and, again, they are abstractions.  He that denies any one of these sources of godhead is ignorant of India.