Mysteries of Creation, the World's Ages, and Soul Wandering The World Soul—Vedic Hymn of Creation—Brahmă the only Reality—Doctrine of the Upanishads—Creation Myths—The Chaos Egg in India and Egypt—Ancestor Worship—Celestial Rishis and Manus—Influence of Folk Religion—Imported Doctrines—The Yugas or Ages of the Universe—Ape God's Revelations—The Ages in Greek and Celtic Mythologies—Universal Destruction—A Deathless Sage—His Account of the Mysteries—Narayana the Creator and Destroyer—Transmigration of Souls—Beliefs in India, Egypt, Greece, and among the Celts. Before the Vedic Age had come to a close an unknown poet, who was one of the world's great thinkers, had risen above the popular materialistic ideas concerning the hammer god and the humanized spirits of Nature, towards the conception of the World Soul and the First Cause—the “Unknown God”. He sang of the mysterious beginning of all things: There was neither existence, nor non-existence, The kingdom of air, nor the sky beyond. What was there to contain, to cover in— Was it but vast, unfathomed depths of water? There was no death there, nor Immortality. No sun was there, dividing day from night. Then was there only THAT, resting within itself. Apart from it, there was not anything. At first within the darkness veiled in darkness, Chaos unknowable, the All lay hid. Till straightway from the formless void made manifest By the great power of heat was born that germ. _Rigveda_, x, 129 (Griffith's trans.). The poet goes on to say that wise men had discovered in their hearts that the germ of Being existed in Not Being. But who, he asked, could tell how Being first originated? The gods came later, and are unable to reveal how Creation began. He who guards the Universe knows, or mayhap he does not know. Other late Rigvedic poets summed up the eternal question regarding the Great Unknown in the interrogative pronoun “What?” (Ka). Men's minds were confronted by an inspiring and insoluble problem. In our own day the Agnostics say, “I do not know”; but this hackneyed phrase does not reflect the spirit of enquiry like the arresting “What?” of the pondering old forest hermits of ancient India. The priests who systematized religious beliefs and practices in the _Brahmanas_ identified “Ka” with Praja´pati, the Creator, and with Brahma, another name of the Creator.