With all its attractions and success, the new Kṛishṇaism did not everywhere overgrow the older stock upon which it had been engrafted. There were many places in which the early worship of Vishṇu and Vāsudēva remained almost unchanged. The new legends of Kṛishṇa's childhood might indeed be accepted in these centres of conservatism, but they made little difference in the spirit and form of the worship, which continued to follow the ancient order. In some of them the Bhagavad-gītā, Nārāyaṇīya, and other epic doctrinals still remained the standard texts, which theologians connected with the ancient Upanishads and the Brahma-sūtra summarising the latter; in other centres there arose, beginning perhaps about the seventh century A.D., a series of Saṃhitās, or manuals of doctrine and practice for the Pāñcharātra[31] sect, which, though in essentials agreeing with the Nārāyaṇīya, taught a different theory of cosmogony and introduced the worship of the goddess Śrī or Lakshmī, the consort of Vishṇu, as the agency or energy through which the Supreme Being becomes active in finite existence; and in yet other places other texts were followed, such as those of the Vaikhānasa school. This worship of Vishṇu-Vāsudēva on the ancient lines was peculiarly vigorous among the representatives of Aryan culture in the South, who had introduced the cults of Vishṇu and Śiva with the rest of the Aryan pantheon into the midst of Dravidian animism. Hinduism, transplanted into the Dravidian area, has there remained more conservative than anywhere else, and has clung firmly to its ancient traditions. There is nothing of Dravidian origin in the South Indian worship of Vishṇu and Śiva; they are entirely Aryan importations. But they have become thoroughly assimilated in their southern home, and each of them has produced a huge mass of fine devotional literature in the vernaculars. In the Tamil country the church of Vishṇu boasts of the Nāl-āyira-prabandham, a collection of Tamil psalms numbering about 4,000 stanzas composed by twelve poets called Ālvārs, which were collected about 1000 A.D.; and the worship of 'Siva is equally well expressed in the Tiru-muṛai, compiled about the twelfth century, of which one section, the Dēvāram, was put together about the same time as the Nāl-āyira-prabandham. Both the Tiru-muṛai and the Nāl-āyira-prabandham breathe the same spirit of ecstatic devotion as the Bhāgavata-purāṇa; they are the utterances of wandering votaries who travelled from temple to temple and poured forth the passionate raptures of their souls in lyrical praise of their deities. Through these three main channels the stream of devotion spread far and wide through the land. Like most currents of what we call "revivalism," it usually had an erotic side; and the larger temples frequently have attached to them female staffs of attendant votaries and _corps de ballet_ of very easy virtue. But this aspect was far more marked in neo-Kṛishṇaism, which often tends to