With Krishna, all the other so-called Avatārs vanish; for they rest on foundations still more flimsy and fanciful. They merely serve as signal proofs of the tendency inherent in the Hindu mind to believe in incarnations and to see such around them. This tendency was already living and creative long before the Christian era, and it has kept its vitality down to the present day; for though Chaitanya, the sixteenth-century reformer, is the most noteworthy of those who within recent times have been counted Avatārs, he is by no means the last: the late Ramkrishna Paramhamsa was regarded as such,[85] and some of her admirers claim the same honour for Mrs. Annie Besant.[86] Further, this making of Avatārs is but one aspect of that passion for deifying men which has characterized Hinduism from first to last,[87] a passion which has set many a modern Englishman among the gods. Even such a whole-hearted Christian as John Nicholson did not escape.[88] The story, then, that Krishna uttered the Song on the battlefield, is a pious imagination. All scholars hold the war to be historical; Krishna’s name can be traced in the literature from the Upanishads downwards; it is possible, or even probable, that he was a Kshattriya prince[89] who fought in the war; but _the assertion that on the field he claimed to be the supreme being, is absolutely negatived by all the early history and literature of India_. * * * * * How then are we to account for the _Gītā_? Whence came its power and its beauty? and how did it reach the form it has?—We must recognise the action of three factors in the formation of the Song, the philosophy, the worship of Krishna, and the author. We have already traced in outline the genesis of the philosophy; there remain the cult and the author. All our scholars recognize that Krishna-worship has existed in India since the fourth century B. C. at least; for there can be no doubt that, when Megasthenes says that Herakles was worshipped in Methora and Kleisobora,[90] he means that Krishna was worshipped in Mathura and Krishnapur. How much further back the cult goes we have no means of learning. Nor does it really matter for our purpose. The important thing to realize is the existence of this worship of Krishna, before his identification with Vishnu[91] and final exaltation to the place of the supreme pantheistic divinity.