[Footnote 27:  When Aryan deities are decadent, Trita, Mitra,
     etc.]

[Footnote 28:  Spiegel holds that the whole idea of future punishment is derived from Persia (Eranische Altherthumskunde, I. p. 458), but his point of view is naturally prejudiced.  The allusion to the supposed Babylonian coin, man[=a], in RV.  VIII. 78. 2, would indicate that the relation with Babylon is one of trade, as with Aegypt.  The account of the flood may be drawn thence, so may the story of Deucalion, but both Hindu and Hellenic versions may be as native as is that of the American redskins.]

     [Footnote 29:  IV. 17. 17.]

     [Footnote 30:  loc. cit. pp. 70, 480.]

* * * * *

CHAPTER IX.

BRAHMANISM.

Besides the Rig Veda and the Atharva Veda there are two others, called respectively the S[=a]ma Veda and the Yajur Veda.[1] The former consists of a small collection of verses, which are taken chiefly from the eighth and ninth books of the Rig Veda, and are arranged for singing.  It has a few more verses than are contained in the corresponding parts of the Rik, but the whole is of no added importance from the present point of view.  It is of course made entirely for the ritual.  Also made for the ritual is the Yajur Veda, the Veda of sacrificial formulae.  But this Veda is far more important.  With it one is brought into a new land, and into a world of ideas that are strange to the Rik.  The period represented by it is a sort of bridge between the Rik and the Br[=a]hmanas.  The Yajus is later than Rik or Atharvan, belonging in its entirety more to the age of the liturgy than to the older Vedic era.  With the Br[=a]hmanas not only is the tone changed from that of the Rig Veda; the whole moral atmosphere is now surcharged with hocus-pocus, mysticism, religiosity, instead of the cheerful, real religion which, however formal, is the soul of the Rik.  In the Br[=a]hmanas there is no freshness, no poetry.  There is in some regards a more scrupulous outward morality, but for the rest there is only cynicism, bigotry, and dullness.  It is true that each of these traits may be found in certain parts of the Rig Veda, but it is not true that they represent there the spirit of the age, as they do in the Brahmanic period.  Of this Brahmanic stoa, to which we now turn, the Yajur Veda forms the fitting entrance.  Here the priest is as much lord as he is in the Br[=a]hmanas.  Here the sacrifice is only the act, the sacrificial forms (yajus), without the spirit.

In distinction from the verse-Veda (the Rik), the Yajur Veda contains the special formulae which the priest that attends to the erection of the altar has to speak, with explanatory remarks added thereto.  This of course stamps the collection as mechanical; but the wonder is that this collection, with the similar Br[=a]hmana scriptures that follow it, should be the only new literature which centuries have to show.[2] As explanatory of the sacrifice there is found, indeed, a good deal of legendary stuff, which sometimes has a literary character.  But nothing is for itself; everything is for the correct performance of the sacrifice.[3]