Neither did the Hindu in that early period so fre- quently evince his consciousness of imperfection by a display of animal sacrifices. The Veda contains not a single example of human victims for sacrifice. I»in- furms us that liy far the most common offering was the fermenting juice of the soma (q. v.) or moon plant, which, expressed and fermented, made an exhilarating and inebriating beverage, and for this reason, most prob- ably, was offered to the gods to increase their beneficial potency. In this the Hindu afterwards beheld a vital sap whereby the imiverse itself is made productive ; but, in bringing such an oblation, it is more likely
that he was actuated by the hope of gratifying the an- imal wants of his divinity rather than by the idea of deepening his own sense of guilt, or by a desire to com- pensate for his own demerit (compare Hardwick, i, 183). Besides this, another oblation, mentioned as agreealile to the gods, and likely to belong to this early period <if Veda worship, was clarified butter, poured upon the fire. There is, however, a class of hymns in the Veda in which " this distinctive utterance of feeling makes room for the language of speculation," in which " the allegories of poetry yield to the mysticism of the reflecting mind, and the mysteries of nature becoming more keenly felt, the circle of beings which overawe tlic jiopular mind becomes enlarged" (Chambers, /■jiri/c/n/indi,/. i, 541). The objects by which Indra, Agni, and tlic other deities are propitiated now become gods. Thus, for example, one whole section of the Eig-Veda, the principal jiart of the Veda (q. v.), is addressed to Soma (see above). Still more prominent is the deification of Soma in the Scima-Veda (comp. Hardwick, Christ, i, 178, 179; Mid- ler, Chips, i, 176).
But in the worship of these powers of nature there is an inclination, at least, if not a real desire, to pay hom- age to one higher being that should prove the Creator of all perishable and changeable beings. There ensued, so to speak, a struggle to reconcile the worship of the elementary powers with the idea of one supreme being, or to emancipate the inquiry into the principle of crea- tion from the elementary religion as found in the oldest portion of Vedic poetry. The former of these efforts is apparent in the Brahmana of the Veda, the latter in the Upanishad (q. v.). In the Brahmanas — a second and later class of Vedic hymns — we see the simple and prim- itive worship become complex and artificial. A special feature is " the tendency to determining the rank of the gods, and, as a consequence, to giving prominence to one special god amongst the rest ; whereas in the old Vedic poetry, though we may discover a predilection of the poets to bestow more praise, for instance, on Indra and Agni than on other gods, yet we find no intention on their part to raise any of them to a supreme rank. Thus, in some Jiri\hmansiS, India, the god of the firma- ment, is endowed with the dignity of a ruler of the gods ; in others, the sun receives the attributes of superiority. This is no real solution of the momentous problem hint- ed at in some Vedic hymns, but it is a semblance of it. There the poet asks ' whence this varied world arose' — here the priest answers that 'one god is more elevated than the rest ;' and he is satisfied with regulating the detail of the Soma and animal sacrifice according to the rank which he assigns to his deities. A real answer to this great question the theologians attempt who explain the ' mysterious doctrine' held in the utmost reverence by all Hindus, and laid down in the writings known under the name of Upanishads, wdiich relate not only to the process of creation, but to the nature of a su- preme being, and its relation to the human soid. In the Upanishads, Agni, Indra, Vayu, and tlie other deities of the Vedic hymns, become symbols to assist the mind in its attempt to understand the true nature of one ab- solute being, and the manner in which it manifests it- self in its worldly form. The human soul itself is of the same nature as this supreme or great soul : its idti- mate destination is that of becoming reunited with the supreme soul, and the means of attaining that end is not the performance of sacrificial rites, but the comprehen- sion of its own self and of the great soul. The doctrine which at a later period became the foundation of the creed of the educated — the doctrine that the supreme soul, or Brahm, is the only reality, and that the world has a claim to notice only in so far as it emanated from this being, is already clearly laid down in these Upanishads, though the language in which it is ex- pressed still adapts itself to the legendary and allegor- ical style that characterizes the Brahmanic portion of the Vedas. The Upanishads became thus the basis nfthe enli'jhtened faith of India. They arc not a system of
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philosophy, but they contain all the germs whence the three great systems of Hindu philosophy arose; and like the latter,\vhile revealing the struggle of the Hindu mind to reach the comprehension of one supreme being, they advance sufficiently far to express their belief in such a being, but at the same time acknowledge the in- ability of the human mind to comprehend its essence" (Chambers, Encydopmdici). See Upanishad.