him dangerous to their power. _Narada_, an
ancient sage (probably a personification of the cloud, the
"water-giver"), is considered as the messenger between the gods and men,
and as having sprung from the forehead of Brahma. The interesting office
of the god of love is held by _Kamadeva_, also called _Ananga_, the
bodyless, because, as the myth relates, having once tried by the power
of his mischievous arrow to make Siva fall in love with Parvati, whilst
he was engaged in devotional practices, the urchin was reduced to ashes
by a glance of the angry god. Two other mythological figures of some
importance are considered as sons of Siva and Parvati, viz. _Karttikeya_
or _Skanda_, the leader of the heavenly armies, who was supposed to have
been fostered by the six _Krittikas_ or Pleiades; and _Ganesa_ ("lord of
troops"), the elephant-headed god of wisdom, and at the same time the
leader of the _dii minorum gentium_.

Orthodox Brahmanical scholasticism makes the attainment of final
emancipation (_mukti_, _moksha_) dependent on perfect knowledge of the
divine essence. This knowledge can only be obtained by complete
abstraction of the mind from external objects and intense meditation on
the divinity, which again presupposes the total extinction of all
sensual instincts by means of austere practices (_tapas_). The chosen
few who succeed in gaining complete mastery over their senses and a full
knowledge of the divine nature become absorbed into the universal soul
immediately on the dissolution of the body. Those devotees, on the other
hand, who have still a residuum, however slight, of ignorance and
worldliness left in them at the time of their death, pass to the world
of Brahma, where their souls, invested with subtile corporeal frames,
await their reunion with the Eternal Being.

The pantheistic doctrine which thus forms the foundation of the
Brahmanical system of belief found its most complete exposition in one
of the six orthodox _darsanas_, or philosophical systems, the _Vedanta_
philosophy. These systems are considered as orthodox inasmuch as they
recognize the Veda as the revealed source of religious belief, and never
fail to claim the authority of the ancient seers for their own
teachings, even though--as in the case of Kapila, the founder of the
materialistic Sankhya system--they involve the denial of so essential a
dogmatic point as the existence of a personal creator of the world. So
much, indeed, had freedom of spec