rth American myth, scattered the stars like spangles over the sky:
"The fathers have adorned the sky with stars".(2)

(1) Rig-Veda, vi. 52,4.

(2) Ibid., x. 68, xi.

Mr. Whitney (Oriental and Linguistic Studies, First Series, p. 59) gives
examples of the ceremony of feeding the Aryan ghosts. "The fathers are
supposed to assemble, upon due invocation, about the altar of him who
would pay them homage, to seat themselves upon the straw or matting
spread for each of the guests invited, and to partake of the offerings
set before them." The food seems chiefly to consist of rice, sesame and
honey.

Important as is the element of ancestor-worship in the evolution of
religion, Mr. Max Muller, in his Hibbert Lectures, merely remarks that
thoughts and feelings about the dead "supplied some of the earliest and
most important elements of religion"; but how these earliest elements
affect his system does not appear. On a general view, then, the
religion of the Vedic poets contained a vast number of elements in
solution--elements such as meet us in every quarter of the globe. The
belief in ancestral ghosts, the adoration of fetishes, the devotion to
a moral ideal, contemplated in the persons of various deities, some of
whom at least have been, and partly remain, personal natural forces, are
all mingled, and all are drifting towards a kind of pantheism, in which,
while everything is divine, and gods are reckoned by millions, the
worshipper has glimpses of one single divine essence. The ritual, as we
have seen, is more or less magical in character. The general elements
of the beliefs are found, in various proportions, everywhere; the
pantheistic mysticism is almost peculiar to India. It is, perhaps,
needless to repeat that a faith so very composite, and already so
strongly differentiated, cannot possibly be "primitive," and that the
beliefs and practices of a race so highly organised in society and
so well equipped in material civilisation as the Vedic Aryans cannot
possibly be "near the beginning". Far from expecting to find in the
Veda the primitive myths of the Aryans, we must remember that myth had
already, when these hymns were sung, become obnoxious to the religious
sentiment. "Thus," writes Barth, "the authors of the hymns have
expurgated, or at least left in the shade, a vast number of legends
older than their time; such, for example, as the identity of soma with
the moon, as the account of the divine families, of the par