, that the myths in the Brahmanas are all later
than the Vedic myths or corruptions of the Veda. Muir remarks,(1) "The
Rig-Veda, though the oldest collection, does not necessarily contain
everything that is of the greatest age in Indian thought or tradition.
We know, for example, that certain legends, bearing the impress of
the highest antiquity, such as that of the deluge, appear first in the
Brahmanas." We are especially interested in this criticism, because most
of the myths which we profess to explain as survivals of savagery are
narrated in the Brahmanas. If these are necessarily late corruptions of
Vedic ideas, because the collection of the Brahmanas is far more modern
than that of the Veda, our argument is instantly disproved. But if ideas
of an earlier stratum of thought than the Vedic stratum may appear in
a later collection, as ideas of an earlier stratum of thought than
the Homeric appear in poetry and prose far later than Homer, then our
contention is legitimate. It will be shown in effect that a number of
myths of the Brahmanas correspond in character and incident with the
myths of savages, such as Cahrocs and Ahts. Our explanation is, that
these tales partly survived, in the minds perhaps of conservative local
priesthoods, from the savage stage of thought, or were borrowed from
aborigines in that stage, or were moulded in more recent times on
surviving examples of that wild early fancy.

(1) Muir, iv. 450.

In the age of the Brahmanas the people have spread southwards from the
basin of the Indus to that of the Ganges. The old sacred texts have
begun to be scarcely comprehensible. The priesthood has become much more
strictly defined and more rigorously constituted. Absurd as it may seem,
the Vedic metres, like the Gayatri, have been personified, and appear as
active heroines of stories presumably older than this personification.
The Asuras have descended from the rank of gods to that of the heavenly
opposition to Indra's government; they are now a kind of fiends, and the
Brahmanas are occupied with long stories about the war in heaven,
itself a very ancient conception. Varuna becomes cruel on occasion, and
hostile. Prajapati becomes the great mythical hero, and inherits the
wildest myths of the savage heroic beasts and birds.

The priests are now Brahmans, a hereditary divine caste, who possess all
the vast and puerile knowledge of ritual and sacrificial minutiae. As
life in the opera is a series of s