The History of Antiquity, Vol. 4 (of 6)

Such a powerful, extensive, and complete alteration of the forms of the civic community, combined with the new conditions of life rendered necessary on the Ganges, must have exercised a deeply-felt influence on the Aryas. The conquest, establishment, and arrangement of extensive dominions had created the monarchy, but at the same time a warlike nobility had sprung up beside the princes in these contests. The land of the Ganges had been won by the sword and divided among the victors. No doubt those who had achieved most in the battles, and stood nearest to the princes, received the best reward in land and slaves, in captives or dependants among the old population. In this way a number of families with larger possessions became distinguished from the mass of the population. In these the delight in arms and war became hereditary; the feeling of the father passed to his son along with his booty, his horses, and his weapons. He could apply himself to the chase, or to the exercise of arms; he was raised above all care for his maintenance, or the necessity of work. He possessed land and slaves to tend his herds or till his fields. From the later position of this order, we might assume that a nobility practised in the use of arms, the Rajnayas, i. e. the princely, the Kshatriyas, i. e. the wealthy or powerful, surrounded the princes in the Ganges in greater numbers and with greater importance than the warriors of pre-eminent position, who in the land of the Indus had aided the tribal princes in battle, in council, and in giving judgment.

The battles for the possession of the new territory were over, and the mutual pressure of the Arian tribes had come to an end. War was no longer a constant occupation, or carried on for existence; it was only at a distance, on the borders of the new states, that battles took place, either to check the incursions of the old inhabitants from the mountains or to extend the territory already possessed. Hence the majority of the settlers preferred to till their lands in peace, and left it to those for whom booty or glory had a charm, to follow their kings in beating back the enemy at the borders, or making an attack on foreign tribes and countries. Those who had to work the soil with their own hands gladly gave up the precedence to this military nobility; the king might fight out his wars with their help, if under such protection the herds could pasture in peace, or the fields be tilled without interruption. It was time enough for the peasants to take arms when the nobles who surrounded the princes were no longer able to keep off the attacks of the enemy. No doubt the Kshatriyas formed a still more favourable estimate of themselves and their position. Busied with their arms, their horses, or the chase, they became proud, and despised the work of the peasant, paying little respect to that laborious occupation in comparison with their own free and adventurous life.

Owing to their close relation to the king, to their weapons, and their possessions, the Kshatriyas took the first place in the new states on the Ganges. This they maintained beyond a doubt for centuries in the kingdom of the Bharatas, among the Matsyas and Çurasenas, the Koçalas, Kaçis, Videhas, Magadhas. In the royal houses and the families of the Kshatriyas the achievements of the forefathers continued to live; they preserved the recollection of the wars of conquest, the struggles for the possession of the lands, which they now held. At their festivals and banquets the minstrels sang to them the songs of the ancient heroes, their ancestors, their mighty deeds, their sufferings and death; they extolled the delight in battle and the martial spirit, the knightly temper and mode of combat, and thus at length arose the poem of the great war. If our assumption, that the conquest of the land on the Ganges may have been completed about the year 1400 B.C., is tenable, we might ascribe to the two following centuries the rise of the Kshatriyas, the establishment of their prominent position in the newly-conquered territory, and to the next century the composition of the songs of the great war in their oldest form.

In the development of other nations the periods of wide expansion, the rise of the military element, and protracted war, usually repress the influence and importance of the priesthood, but among the emigrant Aryas this could not have been the case. We have already seen that among them the contest of sacrifices preceded the contest of arms. The victory fell to the side whose sacrificial bowl Indra had drained. As the correct offering and correct invocation compelled the gods to come down and fight for the nation whose sacrifice they received, the priests were naturally most indispensable in the time of war. The singers of the sacrificial hymns which caused the gods to come down were identical among the Indians with the priests, and were in fact the priests in the stricter sense. With them, minstrel and priest had one name – Brahmana, i. e. one who prays. The hymns of the Vedas showed us how the princes were commanded to set before them at the sacrifice a holy minstrel to offer prayer, and to be liberal to him. The minstrels who accompanied the emigrant tribes to the Yamuna and Ganges had, in those turbulent times, to sing songs of war and victory, as well as to offer prayers at sacrifice, and afterwards to compose the poems on the deeds of the heroes. If the result was that no more new invocations were composed in the period of heroic song, the minstrels nevertheless preserved the old invocations which they had brought with them from the land of the Indus very faithfully. They had imported the ancient worship of their native deities into the new land; they had to preserve the old faith and the old rites at a distance from their ancient home, to offer sacrifice in the old fashion, and thus to win and retain the favour of the gods for the emigrants in their new abode. In the families which claimed to spring from Atri and Agastya, from Bhrigu and Gautama, from Kaçyapa and Vasishtha, one generation handed down by tradition to another the prayers which they had preserved as effectual, and which had been composed, or were thought to have been composed, by these celebrated minstrels, the rites which were considered requisite for the efficacy of the sacrifice, for winning the favour and help of heaven. It is obvious that these families did not consist exclusively of the actual descendants of the supposed tribal ancestor. In ancient times the family is the only form, as yet known, of community and instruction. As the prayers pleasing to the gods and the form of sacrifice could only be learnt from a minstrel and priest, those who had this object in view must seek for admittance into a priestly family, and must be adopted as disciples by a priest in the place of sons.153 Such admittance was naturally most sought after in the case of that race which bore the most famous name, which was supposed to spring from the most celebrated sacrificer of early times, and claimed to possess his songs. Among the "sons of Vasishtha," who, according to the hymn of the Veda (p. 67), sacrificed for the Tritsus, in the race of the Kuçikas to which Viçvamitra belonged, and the other priestly races mentioned in the Veda, we must consider that we have just as much disciples claiming to be descended, or being actually descended, from these supposed ancestors, as relations connected by blood. The importance of these families who preserved the ancient customs and prayers, and worshipped the ancient gods, must have risen in the new territory in proportion to the length of the period between the emigration from the Indus and the present. In different districts the kings regarded the sacrifice and supplication of different races as the most pleasing to the gods. Among the Koçalas, according to the Ramayana and the Puranas, Vasishtha was the priest of the kings; among the Bharatas, the Kuçikas; among the Videhas and Angas, the Gautamas.154 The amalgamation of the various tribes into larger nations had the effect of bringing the priestly families into combination and union, and thus they had the opportunity of exchanging the knowledge of their possession of hymns and ritual. This union taught them to regard themselves as a peculiar order. Princes and nations are always inclined to recognise the merit of those who know how to win for them the favour of the gods, good fortune and health by prayer and sacrifice.

The ancient population of the new states on the Ganges was not entirely extirpated, expelled, or enslaved. Life and freedom were allowed to those who submitted and conformed to the law of the conqueror; they might pass their lives as servants on the farms of the Aryas.155 But though this remnant of the population was spared, the whole body of the immigrants looked down on them with the pride of conquerors – of superiority in arms, blood, and character – and in contrast to them they called themselves Vaiçyas, i. e. tribesmen, comrades – in other words, those who belong to the community or body of rulers.156 Whether the Vaiçya belonged to the order of the nobles, the minstrels and priests, or peasants, was a matter of indifference; he regarded the old inhabitants as an inferior species of mankind. In the land of the Ganges down to the lower course of the river this class of inhabitants bears the common name of Çudras, and as this word is unknown to Sanskrit we must assume that it was the original name of the ancient population of the Ganges, just as the tribes of the Vindhyas bear to this day the common name of Gondas. In the new states on the Ganges, therefore, the population was separated into two sharply-divided masses. How could the conquerors mix with the conquered? – how could their pride stoop to any union with the despised servants? And even if they had been willing to unite, would not the language and character of the immigrants be lost and destroyed in this mixture with tribes of rude customs and manners? As the conquered territory became more extensive, and the old inhabitants more numerous – for many were spared by the numerically weaker immigrants and continued to live among them as slaves or free out-door servants, while others hung upon the borders of the conquered regions – the more pressing was the danger that the noble blood and superior character of the immigrants, and the worship of the ancient gods, might be lost in mingling with this mass of servants. This danger co-operated with the natural pride of the conqueror, and his feeling of superiority, to place a strongly-marked separation between the Çudras and the Aryas.

In every nation which has gone beyond the primitive stages of life, wealth and occupation form the basis of a division into more or less fixed forms, more or less close orders. The states on the Ganges were no exception. Here, beside the Kshatriyas, beside the minstrels and priests, or Brahmans, stood the bulk of the immigrant Aryas, whose land required the personal labour of the owner, to whom the name Vaiçya, at first common to all, gradually passed as a special name. Below these three orders were the Çudras. The name given by the Indians to their orders, varna, i. e. colour, proves that the difference between the light skin of the immigrants and the dark colour of the native population was of considerable influence, and if a doubt were raised whether or not another population is concealed in the fourth order or Çudras, it would be removed by the close union of the three orders against the fourth, the uncompromising exclusion of the latter in all matters of religion, and the fact that the law of East Iran (the Avesta) as well as that of the Ganges, recognises warriors, priests, and peasants, but no fourth order. The sharp distinction between the Aryas and Çudras may subsequently have had an influence on the orders of the Aryas, so as to mark the divisions more strongly; resting on such a foundation, the division of orders might strike deeper roots on the Ganges than elsewhere.

The higher and more favoured strata of society will seldom be free from the desire to bequeath to posterity the advantages they possess; and this feeling makes itself felt with greater force in earlier stages of civilisation than in later. As the possessions and occupation of the father descend to the son who grows up in them, the favoured orders are inclined to maintain this natural relation, and elevate it into a legal rule; they believe that the qualification for their special calling depends on birth in it, or better blood, and make it so to depend. In the states on the Ganges these tendencies must have been the more strongly marked, as in this case the Aryas saw beneath them, in the Çudras, a class of men less capable and less cultivated than themselves; to descend to this class and mingle with it, seemed to them as disgraceful as it was dangerous to the maintenance of their empire over these men. Here it was more natural than elsewhere to pursue this analogy further – to regard even the classes of their own tribe, according to their more or less honourable occupation, as separate circles, as races having different characters and higher or lower gifts, and to transform these distinctions of occupation and social position into rigid castes. Thus the Kshatriyas, in the full consciousness of their aristocratic life, proud of their brave deeds and noble feeling, must have rendered difficult or impossible all approach to their occupation and order; they regarded the minstrels and the priests, and the Vaiçyas, as classes of inferior birth. When the minstrels had sung the praises of the ancient heroic age in the poem of the marvels of the heroes, in the Epos in its earliest form, and so arrived at more peaceful times in which everything no longer depended on the sword, a feeling of their importance and dignity must have grown up among the priests. Without them, without the accurate knowledge of the old songs and customs of sacrifice, as given by Manu and Pururavas, – without precise acquaintance with the prayers in which efficacy rested, efficient sacrifices could not be offered. We have already remarked that the amalgamation of the emigrant tribes, and the formation of the new kingdoms, brought the priests, who had hitherto belonged to the separate tribes, into closer connection and combination, and made them into a separate order. At the same time, their importance as preserving the old rites and the old faith tended to increase. The community thus arising between the priestly families led of necessity to an interchange of forms of prayer and invocations, of songs, and poems, and customs of sacrifice, the exclusive possession of which had hitherto belonged to each of these families or schools. Thus in each of the new states the priestly families attained a larger collection of songs, and a ritual which was the natural product of the liturgies of the various families, the observances regarded by one or other of these as traditional and indispensable. The traditional prayers and songs of praise were regarded as magical spells, of which even the gods could not escape the power. This exchange and combination of spells and rubrics of sacrifice no doubt made the ritual more complicated. The strictly-preserved and now extended possession of these prayers, invocations, and customs, which were known to the priests, separated that order from the Kshatriyas, and the Vaiçyas; they stood in opposition to the other orders, as the exclusive possessors of the knowledge of the customs of sacrifice, and efficient invocations. It was only among the members of this order that the correct observances and invocations were known; how could the Kshatriya or the Vaiçya avoid errors in his offering or invocation, such as would remove their efficacy and change them into their opposite? The constant increase of the prayers and forms accompanying every step in the sacrifice occupied more priests: the Hotar offered the invitation to the god to come down and receive the sacrifice; the Udgatar accompanied the preparation of the offering with the solemn forms and prayers; the Adhvaryu performed the actual rite.

Thus an equality of knowledge, advantage, and interests united the priests against the Kshatriyas, Vaiçyas, and Çudras. By the consciousness that they were in possession of the means to win the favour of the gods for the king, the nobles, and the people, the pious feeling aroused among them was greatly assisted towards gaining the recognition of the other orders. Like the Kshatriyas, they must have scorned to descend to the occupations of the Vaiçyas; they must have felt that only the priest born a priest could perform the priestly service, or offer pleasing sacrifice to the gods. They must have maintained that birth alone in the order could confer the capacity for so important and lofty a calling as theirs. If nobles and priests debarred the Vaiçyas from entrance into their order, their occupations, and modes of life, they must have been no less careful to maintain the advantages of their birth against the Çudras.

If the separation of the orders was the result of a natural progress, if the effort of the favoured classes to close their circles was essentially promoted by the common contrast of the immigrants to the remnant of the old population, the natural conditions in which the Aryas were placed on the Ganges were not without an influence on the maintenance of the separation when once introduced. In the land of the Indus the Aryas had not learned to endure such a climate and such heat as they found on the Ganges. The atmosphere began by degrees to undermine the active and vigorous feeling of the Aryas, to lead them to a life of greater calm and rest, which inclined them to retain the conditions and circumstances once introduced.

The orders attain complete exclusiveness and become castes when not only the change from one to another is forbidden, but when even marriage between the members of different orders is either impossible, or if allowed entails the loss of order, and other disadvantages. We do not exactly know to what extent the mutual exclusiveness of the Kshatriyas, the Brahmans, and the Vaiçyas was carried; we only know that these distinctions existed, and that marriages between the orders took place at the time when the priests succeeded in wresting the first place on the throne and in the state from the Kshatriyas, who had maintained it for centuries.

The priests would never have succeeded in raising themselves above the Kshatriyas and repressing the ancient pre-eminence of the armed nobility so closely connected with the kings, who belonged to their order, and were their born chiefs, had they not succeeded in convincing the people on the Ganges, that the effectual sacrifice was the most important and all-decisive act; that the position in which men stood to the gods was a matter far transcending all other relations. They must have transformed the old religious conceptions by a new doctrine, and by means of this transformation given to themselves a special position, with a peculiar sanction from above. This rise of the priesthood, and their elevation to the first order, is the decisive point in the development of the Arians in India. It was a revolution of Indian life, of the Indian state, of Indian history, of which the effects still continue. It has been observed that the peculiar relations of the tribes on the Ganges, and the nature of the land, tended to fix more strongly there than elsewhere the separation between the orders. But that this division is the sharpest known in history; that the orders became castes, sub-divided in turn into a number of hereditary under-castes; that this unnatural social system has continued in spite of the severest attacks and most violent shocks, and still does continue in unbroken force – this is due to a development of the religious views supplied by the priests, and to the position of the priesthood which was founded on this transformation. The victory over the Kshatriyas was the first step on this path. It was won by means of a new conception of the idea of God, and a scheme of the origin of the world, and the stages of created beings established thereon. On this foundation it was that the priests obtained the highest position.

When the priestly families on the Ganges passed beyond the borders of their several states in their contact with each other, they perceived the extent of the whole treasure of sacrificial song and forms of prayer, which the races had brought over in separate portions from the Indus. The confusing multitude of deities and their attributes, which now forced themselves upon the priests, led to the attempt to discover some unity in the mass. The astonishing abundance of conceptions and the number of the supreme deities in the old prayers were essentially due, as has already been pointed out, to the fact that the Indians desired to render to every god whom they invoked the proper and the highest honour. With this object the number of attributes was increased, and the god in question endowed to a greater or less degree with the power and peculiarities of other deities; and in order to win the favour of the deity to whom the sacrifice was offered, men were inclined to praise him as the highest and mightiest of all gods. This inclination was supported by the circumstance that the quick and lively fancy of the Indians never fixed the outlines of their deities or separated them as individuals, and further, by the blind impulse already noticed, to concentrate the power of the gods in one highest god, and seize the unity of the divine nature. Thus we saw that Indra and Agni, Mitra and Varuna, were in turns extolled as the highest deity. The task now before the priests was to understand the meaning of these old prayers, to grasp the point of agreement in these various invocations, the unity in these wide attributes, ascribed sometimes to one god and sometimes to another. This gave a strong impulse to the reflective mind of the Brahmans, and no sooner did the Indians begin to meditate than their fancy became powerful. The form of Indra, and the conception lying at the base of his divinity – the struggle against the black spirits of darkness – faded away in the land of the Ganges. In that region tempests do not come on with the same violence as in the Panjab; the hot season is followed by the rainy season and the inundation without any convulsions of the atmosphere. Again, as the life of war fell into the background, the position of Indra as a god of war and victory became less prominent. Least of all could the priests in a time of peace recognise the god of their order in the god of war, and in any case the national, warlike, heroic character of Indra could offer few points of contact with priestly meditation. If in consequence of the new circumstances and relations of life, Indra passed into the background – the old gods of light, the common possession of the Aryas in Iran and India, Mitra, Aryaman, Varuna, beside and above whom Indra had risen, were again allowed to come into prominence. The effort to grasp the unity of the divine power seemed to find a satisfactory basis in the form of Varuna, who from his lofty watch-tower beholds all things, is present everywhere, and sits throned in unapproachable light on the waters of heaven, and in the ethical conceptions embodied in the nature of this deity. The Brahmans struck out another path: they set aside altogether Aditi, i. e. the imperishable, who in the old poems of the Veda is the mother of the gods of light, i. e. of "the immortal" (p. 45, n. 2), and in other poems is extolled as the heaven and the firmament, as procreation and birth, as well as other attempts to conceive this unity. The effort to grasp the unity of the divine Being, the attempt to comprehend its nature, took quite another direction – highly significant and important for the character and development of the Indians.

The soma was offered most frequently to Indra, the Açvins, and the Maruts, and by it they are strengthened and nourished. The drink which gave strength to men and intoxicated them nourished and inspired the gods also in the faith of the Indians; it gave them strength, and thus won for men the blessing of the gods. To the Indians it appeared that a potency so effectual must itself be divine – a deity. Hence the soma itself is invoked as a god, and by consistently following out the conception, the Indians see in it the nourisher and even the creator of the gods. "The soma streams forth," we are told in some songs of the Rigveda, "the creator of heaven and the creator of earth, of Agni and of the sun, the creator of Indra and of thoughts." The soma-plants are now the "udders of the sky;" the god is pressed for the gods, and he is offered as drink, who in his liquor contains the universe.157 The sacrificial drink which nourishes the gods, or the spirit of it, is thus exalted to be the most bountiful giver of blessings, the bravest warrior, the conqueror of darkness, the slayer of Vritra, the lord of created things, and even to be the supreme power over the gods, the creator of the sun, the creator and father of Indra and the gods;158 and so the highest power could be ascribed with greater justice to the correct invocations, the efficacious prayers which, according to the ancient faith of the Indians, compelled the gods to come down to the sacrificial meal, and hear the prayers of men. If man could induce or compel the gods to obey the will of men, the means by which this operation was attained must of itself be obviously of a divine and supernatural character. Only a divine power can exercise force over the mighty gods. We saw above how the spirit of fire, which carried the offerings to the sky, was to the Indian the mediator between earth and heaven. But the gifts were accompanied by prayers, and these, according to the idealistic tendencies of the Indians and the opinion of their priests, were the most efficacious part of the sacrifice; in them was contained the elevation of the mind to heaven; and therefore to the Indian the priest was one who offered prayer; and the songs of the Veda lay the greatest weight on "the holy word," i. e. on the prayer, which with them "was the chariot which leads to heaven." Thus a second spirit was placed beside Agni, the bearer of gifts, and this spirit carried prayer into heaven, and was the means by which the priests influenced the gods, the power which compelled the gods to listen to them. This spirit is the personification of the cultus, the power of meditation. It lives in the acts of worship, in the prayers; it is the spirit which in these prayers is the constraining power upon the gods. In the faith of the Indians the gods grow by invocations and prayers; this spirit, therefore, gives them vigour and strength, and as he is able to compel the gods, he must himself be a mighty god.