The religious beliefs and practices of rural India reflect the influence of three general cultural traditions that throughout history have mingled and mixed in varying degrees. Grouped generally, these traditions are those of agricultural cultures, food-gathering communities, and nomadic societies.

Since the third millennium BCE the most stable groups within these three traditions have been those of the agricultural cultures, which are typified by their development of written script and by their emergent sophistication in the production of artifacts reflecting a pervasive consciousness of the earth and its vegetation. The myth-bound lives of people in these cultures have long been linked to the cycles of time experienced in the circular movement of the seasons and in the resulting change in the earth's character. The fundamental energy that gave life to sprouting seeds was commonly understood to be feminine and was represented in female images—although a...