Book Description

Excerpt from A Short Guide to the Cave Temples of Elura: With an Introduction The ancient religion of the Hindus, the so called Vedic-religion, revealed to us in the Hymns of the Rigveda, consisted in the worship of the grand and striking phenomena of nature as conscious beings, possessing powers beyond the control of man, but amenable to his praises and his prayers. There is no well defined pantheon of deities with differentiation of function as we find among the Greeks and Romans, but a purer and more primitive form of nature worship in which the powers and functions assigned to one divine manifestation are constantly running into those of another. In fact, the form of worship presented to us in these most ancient documents of the Aryan people is what Professor Maxmuller calls Henotheism, viz., the deity invoked for the time being is regarded as supreme, is extolled above the rest and is made the recipient of the worshipper's highest praises and most fervent supplications. It is only in the last Book of the Rig Veda and in the Atharva Veda that the idea of a Supreme Deity vaguely occurs but is not fully developed until much later. The main feature of the Vedic worship is the belief in the efficacy of prayer and of sacrificial offerings. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."