plicity of their primitive
character, few gods escaped this adoration, which tended to make them
all universally supreme, each being endowed with all the attributes of
godhead. One might think that no better fate could happen to a god
than thus to be magnified. But when each god in the pantheon was
equally glorified, the effect on the whole was disastrous. In fact, it
was the death of the gods whom it was the intention of the seers to
exalt. And the reason is plain. From this universal praise it resulted
that the individuality of each god became less distinct; every god was
become, so to speak, any god, so far as his peculiar attributes made
him a god at all, so that out of the very praise that was given to him
and his confreres alike there arose the idea of the abstract godhead,
the god who was all the gods, the one god. As a pure abstraction one
finds thus Aditi, as equivalent to 'all the gods,'[25] and then the
more personal idea of the god that is father of all, which soon
becomes the purely personal All-god. It is at this stage where begins
conscious premeditated pantheism, which in its first beginnings is
more like monotheism, although in India there is no monotheism which
does not include devout polytheism, as will be seen in the review of
the formal philosophical systems of religion.

It is thus that we have attempted elsewhere[26] to explain that phase
of Hindu religion which Mueller calls henotheism.

Mueller, indeed, would make of henotheism a new religion, but this, the
worshipping of each divinity in turn as if it were the greatest and
even the only god recognized, is rather the result of the general
tendency to exaltation, united with pantheistic beginnings. Granting
that pure polytheism is found in a few hymns, one may yet say that
this polytheism, with an accompaniment of half-acknowledged
chrematheism, passed soon into the belief that several divinities were
ultimately and essentially but one, which may be described as
homoiotheism; and that the poets of the Rig Veda were unquestionably
esoterically unitarians to a much greater extent and in an earlier
period than has generally been acknowledged. Most of the hymns of the
Rig Veda were composed under the influence of that unification of
deities and tendency to a quasi-monotheism, which eventually results
both in philosophical pantheism, and in the recognition at the same
time of a personal first cause. To express the difference between
Hellenic polythe