(breath) of the gods.... May he not hurt us, he the begetter of
earth, the holy one who begot heaven ... Lord of beings, thou alone
embracest all things ..."

In this closing period of the Rig Veda--a period which in many ways,
the sudden completeness of caste, the recognition of several Vedas,
etc., is much farther removed from the beginning of the work than it
is from the period of Brahmanic speculation--philosophy is hard at
work upon the problems of the origin of gods and of being. As in the
last hymn, water is the origin of all things; out of this springs
fire, and the wind which is the breath of god. So in the great hymn of
creation: "There was then neither not-being nor being; there was no
atmosphere, no sky. What hid (it)? Where and in the protection of
what? Was it water, deep darkness? There was no death nor immortality.
There was no difference between night and day. That One breathed ...
nothing other than this or above it existed. Darkness was concealed in
darkness in the beginning. Undifferentiated water was all this
(universe)." Creation is then declared to have arisen by virtue of
desire, which, in the beginning was the origin of mind;[30] and "the
gods," it is said further, "were created after this." Whether entity
springs from non-entity or vice versa is discussed in another hymn of
the same book.[31] The most celebrated of the pantheistic hymns is
that in which the universe is regarded as portions of the deity
conceived as the primal Person: "Purusha (the Male Person) is this
all, what has been and will be ... all created things are a fourth of
him; that which is immortal in the sky is three-fourths of him." The
hymn is too well known to be quoted entire. All the castes, all gods,
all animals, and the three (or four) Vedas are parts of him.[32]

Such is the mental height to which the seers have raised themselves
before the end of the Rig Veda. The figure of the Father-god,
Praj[=a]pati, 'lord of beings,' begins here; at first an epithet of
Savitar, and finally the type of the head of a pantheon, such as one
finds him to be in the Br[=a]hmanas. In one hymn only (x. 121) is
Praj[=a]pati found as the personal Father-god and All-god. At a time
when philosophy created the one Universal Male Person, the popular
religion, keeping pace, as far as it could, with philosophy, invented
the more anthropomorphized, more human, Father-god--whose name is
ultimately interpreted as an interrogation, God Who? This trait