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TIIE ROAR OF AWAKENING following prayer for power, wherein the divine forces variously manifest in the outer world are conjured to enter the subject, take up their abode in his body, and vivify his faculties.
“The brilliancy that is in the lion, the tiger, and the serpent; in Agni (the god of the sacrificial fire), in the Brāhmans, and in Sūrya (the Sun) shall be ours! May the lovely goddess who bore Indra come to us, endowed with luster!
“The brilliancy that is in the elephant, the panther, and in
Achaeans (to whom they were somehow ielated and whose language resembled Vedic Sanskrit) were descending into Gicece. The Vedic hymns are the oldest extant literary and religious monument of the so-called Indo-European fainily of languages, which comprises all of the literatures of the following traditions: Celtic (Irish, Welsh, Scottish, etc.), Germanic (German, Dutch, English, Norse, Gothic, etc.), Italic (Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Romanian, etc.), Greek, Balto-Slavic (Old Prussian, Lettish, Russian, Czech, l'olish, etc.), Anatolic Armenian, Ancient Phrygian, etc.), Iranian (Persian, Afghan, etc.), and Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit, Pāli, and the modern languages of northern India, such as Hindi, Bengali, Sindhi, Panjabi, and Gujarati-as well as Romany or Gypsy). Many of the gods, beliefs, and observances of the Vedic age closely parallel those of the Homeric. The hymns seem to have been fixed in their present form c. 1500-1000 B.C.
The term Veda includes, however, not only the four hymn collections, but also a class of prosc composition appended to them and known as Brāhmana, composed in the centuries immediately following and representing an age of meticulous theological and liturgical analysis. The Brāhmanas contain long, detailed discussions of the clements and connotations of the Vedic sacrifice, as well as a number of priceless fragments of very ancient Aryan myths and legends.
Following the period of the Brāhmanas came that of the Upanisads (mentioned above), which opened in the cighth century R.c. and culminated in the century of the Buddha (c. 563-483 B.C.). Compare the dates of the Greek age of philosophy, which began with Thales of Miletus (6407-546 B.C.) and culminated in the dialogues of Plato (1277-347 B.c.) and the works of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.).
For the convenience of the reader a brief historical appendix has been prepared, which contains notices of the dates of most of the topics treated in the present volume; sce Appendix B.
