The _Mahabharata_, which deals with the Great War for ascendancy between two families descended from King Bharata, has been aptly referred to as “the Iliad of India”. It appears to have evolved from a cycle of popular hero songs, but after assuming epic form it was utilized by the Brahmans for purposes of religious propaganda. The warriors were represented as sons of gods or allies of demons, and the action of the original narrative was greatly hampered by inserting long speeches and discussions regarding Brahmanic conceptions and beliefs. An excellent example of this process is afforded by the famous _Bhagavad-gita_, from which we have quoted in the previous chapter. The narrative of the first day's battle is interrupted to allow Krishna to expound the doctrines of the Vaishnava faith, with purpose to make converts to the cult of Vishnu. Almost every incident in the poem is utilized in a similar manner. In fact the epic, as we are informed in the opening section, “furnisheth the means of arriving at the knowledge of Brahma”. The priests, with this aim in view, loaded the chariots of heroes with religious treatises, and transformed a tribal struggle for supremacy into a great holy war. If the _Iliad_ survived to us only in Pope's translation, and our theologians had scattered through it, say, metrical renderings of Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_, the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, the _Westminster Confession of Faith_, Fox's _Book of Martyrs_, and a few representative theological works of rival sects, a fate similar to that which has befallen the _Mahabharata_ would now overshadow the great Homeric masterpiece. The “Iliad of India” is a part of what may be called the Hindu Bible, which embraces the _Ramayana_, the _Vedas_, the _Upanishads_, the _Puranas_, &c. The _Ramáyana_, which is called “the Odyssey of India”, because it deals with the wanderings and adventures of the exiled prince Rama, was utilized mainly by the cult of Vishnu, but both Vishnu and Shiva figure as great gods in the _Mahábhárata_, and now one and anon the other is given first place. If the documentary material, which is available in India for dealing with its ancient religious beliefs, were as scanty as those which survive to us from Ancient Egypt, comparisons might have been drawn between the Brahmanic cults and the priestly theorists of Heliopolis, Memphis, Sais, &c., and it might have been remarked of the one nation as of the other that its people clung to archaic beliefs long after new and higher religious conceptions obtained as tenets of orthodox religion. In India the process of change and development can, however, be not only traced, but partially accounted for, as we have shown. Old myths were embraced in the epics and the _Puranas_ for the purpose of educating the people by effecting a compromise between folk religion and the profound doctrines of the ancient forest sages.