Demiurgos of the universe. Evolution began with them from pure spirit, which descending lower and lower down, assumed at last a visible and comprehensible form, and became matter. Arrived at this point, they speculated in the Darwinian method, but on a far more large and comprehensive basis.
In the Rig-Veda-Sanhita, the oldest book of the World[1] (to which even our most prudent Indiologists and Sanscrit scholars assign an antiquity of between two and three thousand years B.C.), in the first book, "Hymns to the Maruts," it is said:
"Not-being and Being are in the highest heaven, in the birthplace of Daksha, in the lap of Aditi" (Mandala, i, Sûkta 166).
"In the first age of the gods, Being (the comprehensible Deity) was born from Not-being (whom no intellect can comprehend); after it were born the Regions (the invisible), from them Uttânapada."
"From Uttânapad the Earth was born, the Regions (those that are visible) were born from the Earth. Daksha was born of Aditi, and Aditi from Daksha" (Ibid.).
Aditi is the Infinite, and Daksha is dákska-pitarah, literally meaning the father of gods, but understood by Max Müller and Roth to mean the fathers of strength, "preserving, possessing, granting faculties." Therefore, it is easy to see that "Daksha, born of Aditi and Aditi from Daksha," means what the moderns understand by "correlation of forces;" the more so as we find in this passage (translated by Prof. Müller):
"I place Agni, the source of all beings, the father of strength" (iii., 27, 2), a clear and identical idea which prevailed so much in the doctrines of the Zoroastrians, the Magians, and the mediaeval fire-philosophers. Agni is god of fire, of the Spiritual Ether, the very substance of the divine essence of the Invisible God present in every atom of His creation and called by the Rosicrucians the "Celestial Fire." If we only carefully compare the verses from this Mandala, one of which runs thus: "The Sky is your father, the Earth your mother, Soma your brother, Aditi your sister" (i., 191, 6),[2] with the inscription on the Smaragdine Tablet of Hermes, we will find the same substratum of metaphysical philosophy, the identical doctrines!
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one thing by adaptation: 'Its father is the sun; its mother is the moon' . . . etc. Separate the earth from the
