In the period immediately following the Br[=a]hmanas, or toward the end of the Brahmanic period, as one will, there is a famous distinction made between the gods.  Some gods, it is said, are spirit-gods; some are work-gods.  They are born of spirit and of works, respectively.  The difference, however, is not essential, but functional; so that one may conclude from this authority, the Nirukta (a grammatical and epexigetical work), that all the gods have a like nature; and that the spirit-gods, who are the older, differ only in lack of specific functions from the work-gods.  A not uninteresting debate follows this passage in regard to the true nature of the gods.  Some people say they are anthropomorphic; others deny this.  “And certainly what is seen of the gods is not anthropomorphic; for example, the sun, the earth, etc."[66] In such a period of theological advance it is matter of indifference to which of a group of gods, all essentially one, is laid the task of creation.  And, indeed, from the Vedic period until the completed systems of philosophy, all creation to the philosopher is but emanation; and stories of specific acts of creation are not regarded by him as detracting from the creative faculty of the First Cause.  The actual creator is for him the factor and agent of the real god.  On the other hand, the vulgar worshipper of every era believed only in reproduction on the part of an anthropomorphic god; and that god’s own origin he satisfactorily explained by the myth of the golden egg.  The view depended in each case not on the age but on the man.

If in these many pages devoted to the Br[=a]hmanas we have produced the impression that the religious literature of this period is a confused jumble, where unite descriptions of ceremonies, formulae, mysticism, superstitions, and all the output of active bigotry; an olla podrida which contains, indeed, odds and ends of sound morality, while it presents, on the whole, a sad view of the latter-day saints, who devoted their lives to making it what it is; we have offered a fairly correct view of the age and its priests, and the rather dreary series of illustrations will not have been collected in vain.  We have given, however, no notion at all of the chief object of this class of writings, the liturgical details of the sacrifices themselves.  Even a resume of one comparatively short ceremony would be so long and tedious that the explication of the intricate formalities would scarcely be a sufficient reward.  With Hillebrandt’s patient analysis of the New-and Full-Moon sacrifice,[67] of which a sketch is given by von Schroeder in his Literatur und Cultur, the curious reader will be able to satisfy himself that a minute description of these ceremonies would do little to further his knowledge of the religion, when once he grasps the fact that the sacrifice is but show.  Symbolism without folk-lore, only with the imbecile imaginings of a daft mysticism, is the soul of it; and its outer form is a certain number of formulae, mechanical movements, oblations, and slaughterings.