As to the state of India before that date, no sort of material evidence has survived, or at any rate has yet been brought to light--no monuments, no inscriptions, very little pottery even, in fact very few traces of the handicraft of man; nor any contemporary records of undoubted authenticity. Fortunately the darkness which would have been otherwise Cimmerian is illuminated, though with a partial and often uncertain light, by the wonderful body of sacred literature which has been handed down to our own times in the Vedas and Brahmanas and Upanishads. To none of these books, which have, for the most part, reached us in various recensions often showing considerable discrepancies and obviously later interpolations, is it possible to ascribe any definite date. But in them we undoubtedly possess a genuine key to the religious thought and social conceptions, and even inferentially to the political institutions of the Aryan Hindus through the many centuries that rolled by between their first southward migrations into the Indian peninsula and their actual emergence into history. The Vedic writings constitute the most ancient documents available to illustrate the growth of religious beliefs founded on pure Nature-worship, which translated themselves into a polytheistic and pantheistic idea of the universe and, in spite of many subsequent transformations, are found to contain all the germs of modern Hinduism as we know it to-day--and, indeed, of all the religious thought of India. In the Vedic hymns Nature itself is divine, and their pantheon consists of the deified forces of Nature, worshipped now as Agni, the god of Fire; Soma, the god and the elixir of life; Indra, the god of heaven and the national god of the Aryans; and again, under more abstract forms, such as Prajapati, the lord of creation, Asura, the great spirit, Brahmanaspati, the lord of prayer; and sometimes, again, gathered together into the transcendent majesty of one all-absorbing divinity, such as Varuna, whose pre-eminence almost verges on monotheism. But the general impression left on the Western mind is of a fantastic kaleidoscope, in which hundreds and even thousands of deities, male and female, are constantly waxing and waning and changing places, and proceeding from, and merging their identity in, others through an infinite series of processes, partly material and partly metaphysical, but ever more and more subject to the inspiration and the purpose of the Brahman, alone versed in the knowledge of the gods, and alone competent to propitiate them by sacrificial rites of increasing intricacy, and by prayers of a rigid formalism that gradually assume the shape of mere incantations.