to the inventor (or author) ... to truth; to the red god, to the snake, to the unconquerable one, to the blue-haired one, to the trident-holder; ... to the inconceivable one ... to him whose sign is the bull; ... to the creator of all, who pervades all, who is worshipped by all, Lord of all, Carva, Cankara, Civa, ... who has a thousand heads a thousand arms, and death, a thousand eyes and legs, whose acts are innumerable.”  In vii. 201. 71, Civa is the unborn Lord, inconceivable, the soul of action, the unmoved one; and he that knows Civa as the self of self, as the unknowable one, goes to brahma-bliss.  This also is late Civaism in pantheistic form.  In other words, everything said of Vishnu must be repeated for Civa.[26]

As an example of the position of the lowest member of the later trinity and his very subordinate place, may be cited a passage from the preceding book of the epic.  According to the story in vi. 65. 42 ff., the seers were all engaged in worshipping Brahm[=a], as the highest divinity they knew, when he suddenly began to worship “the Person (Spirit), the highest Lord”; and Brahm[=a] then lauds Vishnu as such:  “Thou art the god of the universe, the All-god, V[=a]sudeva (Krishna).  Therefore I worship thee as the divinity; thou, whose soul is devotion.  Victory to thee, great god of all; thou takest satisfaction in that which benefits the world....  Lord of lords of all, thou out of whose navel springs the lotus, and whose eyes are large; Lord of the things that were, that are, that are to be; O dear one, self-born of the self-born ...  O great snake, O boar,[27] O thou the first one, thou who dwellest in all, endless one, known as brahma, everlasting origin of all beings ... destroyer of the worlds!  Thy feet are the earth ... heaven is thy head ...  I, Brahm[=a], am thy form ...  Sun and moon are thy eyes ...  Gods and all beings were by me created on earth, but they owe their origin to thy goodness.”  Then the creation of Vishnu through Pradyumna as a form of the deity is described, “and Vishnu (Aniruddha) created me, Brahm[=a], the upholder of the worlds; so am I made of Vishnu; I am caused only by thee.”

While Brahm[=a] is represented here as identical with Vishnu he is at the same time a distinctly inferior personality, created by Vishnu for the purpose of creating worlds, a factor of inferior godliness to that of the World-Spirit, Krishna-Vishnu.

It had been stated by Holtzmann[28] that Brahm[=a] sometimes appears in the epic as a god superior to Vishnu, and on the strength of this L. von Schroeder has put the date of the early epic between the seventh and fourth centuries B.C, because at that time Brahm[=a] was the chief god.[29] von Schroeder rather exaggerates Holtzmann’s results, and asserts that “in the original form of the poem Brahm[=a] appears throughout as the highest and most revered god, while the worship of Vishnu and Civa as great gods is apparently a later