THE ORIGIN OF THEOSOPHY 485 



and obscene character. The entire material has the look of a fossil : it 

 is something which must have stood in a prehistoric period outside 

 of the sacrifice, being connected with it at first by looser, more 

 accidental ties, until the rigid formalism of which the existing texts 

 are the final expression had placed everything upon the same footing 

 of sanctity. The nursery-charade, and worse, cannot reasonably be 

 supposed to have found its way into the ritual in any other way. 

 This is true in spite of the scientific seriousness of the Hindu mind 

 and its nai've love of schematizing, which makes it possible in later 

 times for the ars amandi (kdma^astra) to treat the most incredible 

 things in scientific sutra style the style, for instance, of the sutras of 

 the Vedanta and Sankhya philosophies, or the grammatical rules 

 of Panini. This material was obviously popular at first, and I have 

 little doubt as to the reason of its presence in the sacred texts. It 

 generally occurs in close neighborhood to the festive "gift-praises," 

 which, as stated above, were not only intended to stimulate future 

 givers, but also mark the note of hilarity. No doubt these served as 

 a bridge from the real solemnities of the sacrifice to what, for lack 

 of a better term, we might call borrowing a German student term 



a kind of a liturgic "saukneipe." Plainly speaking, the bestowal 

 of the sacrificial fees (dakshind) in many cases must have led to 

 gormandizing and drunkenness, and these were probably in turn 

 followed the practice is not entirely unknown at the present day 



by shallow witticisms of this sort. This we must not imagine to 

 have taken place without interruption, without recollection of the 

 religious character of the occasion as a whole, because theosophic 

 and cosmic riddles and discussions come in too. In the main, however, 

 social jollification w r as the original motive, until, in the course of 

 the ossification of the ritual, even the most trivial moments march 

 by in the procession of the sacrifice, misunderstood and suspected, 

 yet respected. They are now as sacred and ineradicable as the most 

 thoughtful prayer to the gods. But a modern Vedantist, the late 

 Svami Vivekananda, found it in his heart to speak of "those dis- 

 gusting Vedas." 



We can now understand both the origin and the enormous pro- 

 pagation of the theosophic riddle and the theosophic hymn, which is 

 always more or less of a riddle. Grown from folk-lore roots, fructified 

 by the Hindus' intense appreciation of all relations as mysteries, 

 it grew to full strength in connection with the sacrifice and its 

 patronage of a superior variety of religious intellect. The highest 

 forms of Hindu religion have always operated from the ontological 

 side, from the severely intellectual side. Faith and piety, sentiment 

 and emotion, are almost entirely wanting in early Brahmanism, 

 although in later times bhakti, or piety, tends to rival the religious 

 emotions of John Tauler and Thomas a Kempis. No one will say that 



