placated, and consequently there is, at the beginning of every enterprise (among others, literary enterprises) in the Renaissance literature, but never in the works of religion or law or in any but modern profane literature, an invocation to Civa.  But he is no more a patron of literature than is Ganeca, or in other words, Civaism is not more literary than is Ganecaism.  In a literary country no religion is so illiterate as Civaism, no writings are so inane as are those in his honor.  There is no poem, no religious literary monument, no Pur[=a]na even, dedicated to Civa, that has any literary merit.  All that is readable in sectarian literature, the best Pur[=a]nas, the Divine Song, the sectarian R[=a]m[=a]yana, come from Vishnuism.  Civaism has nothing to compare with this, except in the works of them that pretend to be Civaites but are really not sectaries, like the Sittars and the author of the Cvet[=a]cvatara.  Civa as a ‘patron of literature’ takes just the place taken by Ganeca in the present beginning of the Mah[=a]bh[=a]rata.  Vy[=a]sa has here composed the poem[42] but Ganeca is invoked as Vighneca, ‘Lord of difficulties,’ to help the poet write it out.  Vy[=a]sa does the intellectual work and Ganeca performs the manual labor.  Vishnuism, in a word, is the only cultivated (native) sectarian religion of India; and the orthodox cult, in that it is Vedantic, lies nearer to Vishnuism than to Civaism.  Why then does one find Civa invoked by philosophy?  Because monotheism in distinction from pantheism was the belief of the wise in the first centuries after the Christian era, till the genius of Cankara definitively raised pantheism in alliance with orthodoxy to be the more esteemed; and because Civa alone, when the choice lay between him and Vishnu, could be selected as the One God.  For Vishnuism was now merged with Krishnaism, a new vulgar cult, and Civa was an old and venerated god, long since a member of the Brahmanic pantheon.  The connection between Civaism and the S[=a]nkhya system gave it a more respectable and archaic appearance in the eyes of the conservative Brahman, while the original asceticism of Civa undoubtedly appealed much more to Brahmanic feeling than did the sentimentalism of the Vishnuite.  In the extreme North, in the ninth century, philosophy and Civaism are nominally allied, but really sectarian Civaism was the cult of the lowest, not of the highest classes.  Many of the professed Civaites are to-day tending to Vedantism, which is the proper philosophy of the Vishnuite; and the Civaite sects are waning before the Vishnuite power, not only in the middle North, where the mass of the population is devoted to Vishnu, but even in Civa’s later provinces in the extreme South.  The social distribution of the sectaries in the Middle Ages was such that one may assign older Vishnuism to the middle classes, and Civaism to the highest on its philosophical and decently ascetic side, but to the lowest on its phallic and magical side.