functions, it would be hazardous to say that she was a personal form of Earth.[1]
The study of the Indian Mother cults is for many reasons difficult. In their earliest forms they are aniconic and unco-ordinated, and literary evidence of the more primitive Dravidian cults is, of course, wanting. When they have been taken over by the Brāhmans they have been so worked over and metamorphosed that many of their original features are now unintelligible. When these deities influence fertility the cultus is to a large extent magical, and as magic necessarily involves secrecy, enquirers of a different faith are unable to investigate it. In the case of Saktism, the latest development, these difficulties are increased, because the worship of the female productive energies offends the nobler and more sober instincts of Hindus, and the rites are necessarily conducted with precautions against the intrusion of outsiders in the mysteries.
When we compare the Aryan and Dravidian pantheons in India an important difference at once attracts attention.[2] In Vedic belief and ritual goddesses occupy a very subordinate position, they play hardly any part as rulers of the world, and only two—Ushas, the spirit of the dawn, and Sarasvatī, originally the impersonation of a sacred river—acquired special importance.[3] In the same way, in Babylonia, except Ishtar, the goddesses are not very imposing figures, their characteristics are not sharply defined or differentiated, and their position conforms to the low conception of women in that civilisation.[4] In the modern
- ↑ M. Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, 140; L. W. King, Babylonian Religion and Mythology, 10, 17; L. R. Farnell, Greece and Babylon, 114. On Babylonian influence in India, see A. A. Macdonell, A. B. Keith, Vedic India, i. 430 et seq., ii. 128 et seq. 432.
- ↑ The distinctive difference between the Aryans and the Dasyu was one of religion—Macdonell-Keith, Vedic Index, i. 347, 357.
- ↑ A. A. Macdonell, Vedic Mythology, 124 et seq.; Sir R. G. Bhandarkar, Vaisnavism, Saivism, and Minor Religious Systems, 142 et seqq.
- ↑ L. W. King, op. cit. 22 et seq.
