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The king himself offered sacrifice for his tribe in his own house, there were no temples, but he was frequently assisted by a man or several men of special learning in such rites. The hymns of the Rigveda were written for use at sacrifices.
Philosophy is busy from the first with the Vedic gods; the impulse to good conduct and that to mysticism are equally innate in this religion. We can see, even in the Rigveda, that India is to solve the problem of its many gods not in the way of Monotheism, by making one god rule over the others, but in the way of Pantheism, by making all the gods modes or manifestations of one being.
Nowhere else can the progress of religion through what we might call its seven ages of life be seen so clearly, nor the logical connection of these ages with each other be recognised so unmistakably. The present chapter deals with the infancy and lusty youth of the religion as seen in Vedism; the later stages of Brahmanism and Buddhism will be spoken of in subsequent chapters. The Rigveda.
The undoubted antiquity of these pieces favours this view; the Rigveda is admitted on all hands to be the earliest part of Indian literature, and many of the hymns were written about 1500 B.C. The pure and simple nature of the Vedic religion may also appear to favour this view. It is a religion singularly free from the lower elements of man's early faith.
Now the later religious literature of India, the brahmanas or commentaries on the Rigveda and the other later Vedas, contain a variety of legends and a religion by no means free from magic. It may be maintained therefore that the pure religion of the Aryans afterwards became contaminated by contact with the lower religion of the tribes the Aryans had conquered.
The Vedic religion takes its name from the Rigveda, the oldest portion of Indian literature, and the earliest literary document of Aryan religion. Of four vedas or collections of hymns, the Rigveda is the oldest and most interesting.
"Agni is all the Gods" we read here. And a religion which arranges its objects of worship in this way will not be a religion of action, but of speculation and of resignation. S. B. E. vol. xxxii. Vedic Hymns. xlvi. Hymns to Agni. Muir's Sanscrit Texts. M. Müller's Hibbert Lectures. Kaegi, The Rigveda, the oldest literature of the Indians, 1886.
What is historically the oldest, may from a higher point of view be quite modern, and there are scholars who even look upon Adam as a reformer of mankind. Those who best know the Rigveda have often shown that it stands at a tolerably advanced stage, and here and there casts a distant glance into its own past.
But the Rigveda did a great work for India in cultivating gods who were moral, and to whom man was drawn by higher than selfish motives.
Agni, who is one of the chief deities of the Rigveda, is fire, and Soma, the deity to whom all the hymns of the ninth book are addressed, is simply the juice of the soma plant, the liquid part of every sacrifice.
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