The heavens of the Hindu gods are essentially material and sensuous, with their palaces and gardens, music and dancing, their lively Gandharvas and frail Apsaras. Yet the goddesses play a very subordinate part, indeed, in India’s heroic age. We find in the Epics no powerful Hera, no wise Pallas Athene, no lovely Venus, no silver-footed Thetis--bright creations which lend such a charm to the myths of Hellas. Ganga, it is true, acts a minor and appointed part in the great drama, and Parbati is mentioned, while Durga and Kali only flit across the stage. But it is quite evident that in the Olympus of the Aryan Indians the goddesses had not attained the power and dignity they enjoy to-day. The frequent boasts in the Epics against the celestials with Indra at their head, the way in which every chief or leader, even of the Venars, is said to be a match for Indra’s self, seem to indicate an unmistakable, if covert, hostility to the old gods of the Aryan invaders, which is well worthy of notice, as indicating a transition period in the religious development of the Hindus, a period of doubt and confusion, which is emphasized by the fulsome flattery addressed to anyone of whom a favour is desired, be he man or god. He is the _best_ of men, the greatest of kings; equal to gods, he is a god; he is Indra; he is Yama; he is Prajapati; he is superior to all the gods; he is the ruler of the three worlds; he is, in fact, anything and all things to the uncertain suppliant who craves his help. And in these perplexities we seem to have a share too; for under the influence of the pantheistic notions of the writers, combined with their conceptions of endless transmigrations and utter indifference to permanent shapes of any kind, individuality seems lost (as when we find Krishna addressed as the younger brother of Indra[130]), and a world of confused phantasmagorial forms seems to dance before us, till we feel dizzy contemplating this distracting and impermanent universe. But amidst the ever-shifting pageant of existence the Hindu seems to have arrived at and firmly grasped the idea of a periodic law which has given a certain grandeur to his speculations about both the past and the hereafter. From the orderly sequence of natural phenomena, as in the succession of day and night; in the measured march of the seasons of the revolving year; in the periodic movements of the heavenly bodies; the Hindu recognized an appointed, unvarying and endless cycle of changes. Generalizing from these facts he concluded that this law must hold for the entire Cosmos as well, which would pass through its grand but destined cycle of changes, over and over again, in the æons of eternity. He held these ideas in common with the Greek of old, and, like the Greek of old, he never rose to the conception of progress, development, evolution.[131]