less as a battlefield of principles than as a theatre for the display of
natural forces. No one god assumes lordship over the others but all are
seen to be interchangeable—mere names and aspects of something which is
greater than any god.

Indian religion is commonly regarded as the offspring of an Aryan
religion, brought into India by invaders from the north and modified by
contact with Dravidian civilization. The materials at our disposal
hardly permit us to take any other point of view, for the literature of
the Vedic Aryans is relatively ancient and full and we have no
information about the old Dravidians comparable with it. But were our
knowledge less one-sided, we might see that it would be more correct to
describe Indian religion as Dravidian religion stimulated and modified
by the ideas of Aryan invaders. For the greatest deities of Hinduism,
Siva, Krishna, Râma, Durgâ and some of its most essential doctrines such
as metempsychosis and divine incarnations, are either totally unknown to
the Veda or obscurely adumbrated in it. The chief characteristics of
mature Indian religion are characteristics of an area, not of a race,
and they are not the characteristics of religion in Persia, Greece or
other Aryan lands[5].

Some writers explain Indian religion as the worship of nature spirits,
others as the veneration of the dead. But it is a mistake to see in the
religion of any large area only one origin or impulse. The principles
which in a learned form are championed to-day by various professors
represent thoughts which were creative in early times. In ancient India
there were some whose minds turned to their ancestors and dead friends
while others saw divinity in the wonders of storm, spring and harvest.
Krishna is in the main a product of hero worship, but Śiva has no such
historical basis. He personifies the powers of birth and death, of