regarded as the offspring of an Aryan
religion, brought into India by invaders from the north and modified by
contact with Dravidian civilization. The materials at our disposal
hardly permit us to take any other point of view, for the literature of
the Vedic Aryans is relatively ancient and full and we have no
information about the old Dravidians comparable with it. But were our
knowledge less one-sided, we might see that it would be more correct to
describe Indian religion as Dravidian religion stimulated and modified
by the ideas of Aryan invaders. For the greatest deities of Hinduism,
Siva, Krishna, Rama, Durga and some of its most essential doctrines such
as metempsychosis and divine incarnations, are either totally unknown to
the Veda or obscurely adumbrated in it. The chief characteristics of
mature Indian religion are characteristics of an area, not of a race,
and they are not the characteristics of religion in Persia, Greece or
other Aryan lands[5].

Some writers explain Indian religion as the worship of nature spirits,
others as the veneration of the dead. But it is a mistake to see in the
religion of any large area only one origin or impulse. The principles
which in a learned form are championed to-day by various professors
represent thoughts which were creative in early times. In ancient India
there were some whose minds turned to their ancestors and dead friends
while others saw divinity in the wonders of storm, spring and harvest.
Krishna is in the main a product of hero worship, but Siva has no such
historical basis. He personifies the powers of birth and death, of
change, decay and rebirth--in fact all that we include in the prosaic
word nature. Assuredly both these lines of thought--the worship of nature
and of the dead--and perhaps many others existed in ancient India.

By the time of the Upanishads, that is about 600 B.C., we trace three
clear currents in Indian religion which have persisted until the present
day. The first is ritual. This became extraordinarily complicated but
retained its primitive and magical character. The object of an ancient
Indian sacrifice was partly to please the gods but still more to coerce
them by certain acts and formulae[6]. Secondly all Hindus lay stress on
asceticism and self-mortification, as a means of purifying the soul and
obtaining supernatural powers. They have a conviction that every man who
is in earnest about religion and even every student of philosophy must