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And then he reached the summit called Brahmatunga, and then many rivers, and then many inhabited provinces. And he arrived at Satasinga, and the woods known by the name of Sharyati. And then he beheld the sacred spot known as the Horse-head, and then the region of Atharvana.
It was 'the fact that, while in the earliest accessible documents of religious thought we look in vain for any very clear traces of fetichism, they become more and more frequent everywhere in the later stages of religious development, and are certainly more visible in the later corruptions of the Indian religion, beginning with the Atharvana, than in the earliest hymns of the Rig Veda. Now, by the earliest accessible documents of religious thought, Professor Max Muller means the hymns of the Rig Veda.
There at the beginning Narada says, 'I know the Rig-veda, the Yajur-veda, the Sama-veda, the Atharvana as the fourth, the Itihasa- purana as the fifth, and so on, enumerating all the various branches of knowledge, and finally summing up 'with all this I know the mantras only, I do not know the Self. Now this declaration of the knowledge of the Self not being attainable through any branch of knowledge except the knowledge of the Bhuman evidently has no other purpose but to glorify this latter knowledge, which is about to be expounded.
Professor Max Muller has still, moreover, to explain how the process of corruption which introduced the same fetichistic practices among Samoyeds, Brazilians, Kaffirs, and the people of the Atharvana Veda came to be everywhere identical in its results. Here an argument often urged against the anthropological method may be shortly disposed of.
One possessed of wisdom should offer garlands of aquatic flowers, such as the lotus and the like, unto the Gandharvas and Nagas and Yakshas. Such plants and herbs as produce red flowers, as are possessed of keen scent, and as are prickly, have been laid down in the Atharvana as fit for all acts of incantation for injuring foes.
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