In less degree, because here the conditions are more obvious, does this apply to the religious interpretation of the great body of literature which has conserved for posterity the beginnings of Hinduism.  But upon this we have already animadverted, and now need only range this literature in line with its predecessors.  Not because the epic pictures Krishna as making obeisance to Civa is Krishna here the undeveloped man-god, who represents but the beginning of his (later) greatness, and is still subject to the older Civa.  On the contrary, it is the epic’s last extravagance in regard to Civa (who has already bowed before the great image of Krishna-Vishnu) that demands a furious counter-blast against the rival god.  It is the Civaite who says that Krishna-Vishnu bows; and because it is the Civaite, and because this is the national mode of expression of every sectary, therefore what the Civaite says is in all probability historically false, and the sober historian will at least not discover ‘the earlier Krishna’ in the Krishna portrayed by his rival’s satellites.

But when one comes to the modern sects, then he has to deplore not so much the lack of historical data as the grotesque form into which this same over-vivid imagination of the Hindu has builded his gods.  As the scientific systems grow more and more fancifully, detailed, and as the liturgy flowers out into the most extraordinary bloom of weird legend, so the images of the gods, to the eye in their temples, to the mind in the descriptions of them, take to themselves the most uncouth details imagined by a curious fancy.  This god is an ascetic; he must be portrayed with the ascetic’s hair, the ascetic’s wild appearance.  He kills; he must be depicted as a monster, every trait exaggerated, every conceivable horror detailed.  This god sported with the shepherdesses; he must have love-adventures related in full, and be worshipped as a darling god of love; and in this worship all must be pictured in excess, that weaker mortal power may strive to appreciate the magnitude of the divine in every fine detail.

These traits are those of late Vedism, Brahmanism, and Hinduism.  But how marked is the contrast with the earlier Vedic age!  The grotesque fancy, the love of minutiae, in a word, the extravagance of imagination and unreason are here absent, or present only in hymns that contrast vividly with those of the older tone.  This older tone is Aryan, the later is Hindu, and it is another proof of what we have already emphasized, that the Hinduizing influence was felt in the later Vedic or Brahmanic period.  There is, indeed, almost as great a gulf between the Dawn-hymns and the Catapatha as there is between the latter and the Pur[=a]nas.  One may rest assured that the perverted later taste reproduces the advance of Hindu influence upon the Aryan mind exactly in proportion to the enormity displayed.