India has its own panorama of religions, from the animistic practice of the tribes of the jungle and the hills, up to the refined pantheism of the philosophical school. Diversities of race have been strangely intermingled, and fifty languages make it impossible to secure any uniformity of culture. There are the descendants of the ancient inhabitants who occupied the country before {59} the Aryan ancestors of the Hindus settled themselves upon the fertile lands. They are represented to-day by the wild tribes of Central India such as the Bhils and Gonds. Some ten million probably profess a religion of a well-marked animistic type. But this also lies at the base of wide-spread popular belief and custom, where the propitiation of spirits, the cultus of Mother Earth, and the veneration of village deities, engage much more attention than the higher gods of Hinduism. The literary foundation of the religions of India lies in the ancient hymns of the Rig Veda, sung by the immigrant Aryans as they entered from the North-west and gradually established themselves in the Ganges valley. These hymns were addressed to gods of earth and air and sky; they celebrated the glories of dawn and day; they told of the conflict between sunshine and storm; they praised Agni, the god of fire, messenger between heaven and earth, himself as agent of the sacrifice a kind of priest among the gods; they commemorated the dead who passed into the upper world and adorned the sky with stars. Already in some of the later hymns the poet's thought endeavoured to find some principle or power that should unite these different agencies as manifestations of one ultimate reality; and philosophic imagination at length fixed on the conception of Brahman, a term whose original meaning {60} seems to hover between that of sacred spell and prayer. Viewed in a personal aspect (Brahma) as a god of popular worship, he could be described as "Lord of all, the Maker, the Creator, Father of all that are and are to be."[1] But behind this sovereign ruler metaphysical abstraction placed a neuter Brahma, all-embracing, the ground of all existence, summed up in three terms--Being, Thought, and Bliss. Here was the ultimate Self of the whole universe; and to know the identity of the human self with the Absolute, to be able to repeat the mysterious words _tat tvam asi_, "that art thou," was the aim of the forest-sages and the highest attainment of holy insight. [1] So in the early Buddhist texts describing the popular religion. Many new forms appear in these documents.