king of the gods, ruling with the same
forms and under the same conditions as a human sovereign. When men of
finer cast realised that the kingdom of the spirit is higher than
earthly royalty, they turned away from Indra and set their souls upon
greater conceptions, ideals of vaster spiritual forces, mystic
infinitudes. Attracted thus to worships such as those of Siva and
Vishnu, they filled them with their own visions and imparted to these
gods the ideals of their own strivings, making them into Yogisvaras,
Supreme Mystics. And so the sequence of change has gone on through the
generations. Most potently it has been effected by the characters of
the preachers and teachers of religion. Almost every teacher who has a
personality of his own, whose soul contains thoughts other than those
of the common sort, stamps something of his own type upon the ideal of
his god which he imparts to his followers, and which may thereby come
to be authoritatively recognised as a canonical character of the god.
India is peculiarly liable to this transference of personality from
the guru to the god whom the guru preaches, because from immemorial
times India has regarded the guru as representative of the god, and
often deifies him as a permanent phase of the deity. Saivas declare
that in the guru who teaches the way of salvation Siva himself is
manifested: Vaishnavas tell the same tale, and find a short road to
salvation by surrendering their souls to him. We have seen cases of
apotheosis of the guru in modern and medieval times; reasoning from
the known to the unknown, we may be sure that it took place no less
regularly in ancient ages, and brought about most of the surprising
changes in the character of gods which we have noticed. Sometimes the
gurus have only preached some new features in the characters of their
gods; sometimes, as is the Hindu fashion, they have also exhibited in
their own persons, their dress and equipment, their original ideas of
divinity, as, for example, Lakulisa with his club; and their sanctity
and apotheosis have ratified their innovations in theology and
iconology, which have spread abroad as their congregations have grown.
Thus the gurus and their congregations have made the history of their
deities, recasting the gods ever anew in the mould of man's hopes and
strivings and ideals. There is much truth in the saying of the
Brahmanas: "In the beginning the gods were mortal."

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