ts, such as you look for in vain anywhere else; and though
there is still a considerable interval between the Devas of the Veda,
even in their highest form, and such concepts as Zeus, Apollon, and
Athene, yet the chief riddle is solved, and we know now at last what
stuff the gods of the ancient world were made of.

But this theogonic process is but one side of the ancient Vedic
religion, and there are two other sides of at least the same
importance and of even a deeper interest to us.

There are in fact three religions in the Veda, or, if I may say so,
three naves in one great temple, reared, as it were, before our eyes
by poets, prophets, and philosophers. Here too we can watch the work
and the workmen. We have not to deal with hard formulas only, with
unintelligible ceremonies, or petrified fetiches. We can see how the
human mind arrives by a perfectly rational process at all its later
irrationalities. This is what distinguishes the Veda from all other
Sacred Books. Much, no doubt, in the Veda also, and in the Vedic
ceremonial, is already old and unintelligible, hard, and petrified.
But in many cases the development of names and concepts, their
transition from the natural to the supernatural, from the individual
to the general, is still going on, and it is for that very reason that
we find it so difficult, nay almost impossible, to translate the
growing thoughts of the Veda into the full-grown and more than
full-grown language of our time.

Let us take one of the oldest words for god in the Veda, such as d e v a,
the Latin _deus_. The dictionaries tell you that d e v a means god and
gods, and so, no doubt, it does. But if we always translated d e v a in
the Vedic hymns by god, we should not be translating, but completely
transforming the thoughts of the Vedic poets. I do not mean only that
_our_ idea of God is totally different from the idea that was intended
to be expressed by d e v a; but even the Greek and Roman concept of gods
would be totally inadequate to convey the thoughts imbedded in the
Vedic d e v a. D e v a meant originally bright, and nothing else. Meaning
bright, it was constantly used of the sky, the stars, the sun, the
dawn, the day, the spring, the rivers, the earth; and when a poet
wished to speak of all of these by one and the same word--by what we
should call a general term--he called them D e v a s. When that had been
done, D e v a did no longer mean "the Bright ones," but the name
comprehended