Worship consisted in prayers and offerings, especially in the Soma-offering, which was offered as food to the gods. No fear of future torment after death as yet embittered the enjoyment of life and made dying fearful. Yama was the friendly guide of the souls of heroes to the heaven of Indra or Varuna, and not yet the inexorable prince of hell who tormented the souls of the ungodly in the kingdom of the dead. Of later barbarous usages also, such as the widow's sacrificing herself on the funeral pile of her departed husband, there was as yet no trace; and in the heroic poetry, as yet not disfigured by later Brahminical alterations and additions, the heroes Krishna and Rama appear as types of courage and self-sacrifice, and not, as later, as avatars, or human incarnations, of the deity. _b. Brahminism._ When the nomadic and warlike life of the nations of India in the land of the seven rivers, in connection with their removal to the conquered land of the Ganges (1300 B.C.), gave place to a more ordered social constitution, a priestly class formed itself, which began to represent the people before the deity, and from its chief function, _Brahma_, or prayer, took the name of _Brahmins_, i.e., the praying. This Brahma, before whose power even the gods must yield, was gradually exalted by the Brahmins to the highest deity, to whom, under the name of Brahma, the old Veda divinities were subordinated. Brahma is no god of the people, but a god of the priests; not the lord of nature, but the abstract and impersonal _Being_, out of whom nature and her phenomena emanate. From Brahma the priest derives his authority; and the system of caste, by which the priesthood is raised to the first rank, its origin. The worship of Brahma consists in doing penance and in abstinence. Yama, once a celestial divinity, now becomes the god of the lower world, where he who disobeys Brahma is tormented after death. Immortality consists in returning to Brahma; but is the portion only of the perfectly godly Brahmin, while the rest of mankind can rise to this perfect state only after many painful new births. The Brahmin, in the exclusive possession of religious knowledge, reads and expounds the Vedas (knowledge), exalted to infallible scripture, and on them constructs his doctrine.