Long before there was any formal recognition of the dogma that all gods are one, various gods had been identified by the Vedic poets. Especially, as most naturally, was this the case when diverse gods having different names were similar in any way, such as Indra and Agni, whose glory is fire; or Varuna and Mitra, whose seat is the sky. From this casual union of like pairs comes the peculiar custom of invoking two gods as one. But even in the case of gods not so radically connected, if their functions were mutually approximate, each in turn became credited with his neighbor's acts. If the traits were similar which characterized each, if the circles of activity overlapped at all, then those divinities that originally were tangent to each other gradually became concentric, and eventually were united. And so the lines between the gods were wiped out, as it were, by their conceptions crowding upon one another. There was another factor, however, in the development of this unconscious, or, at least, unacknowledged, pantheism. Aided by the likeness or identity of attributes in Indra, Savitar, Agni, Mitra, and other gods, many of which were virtually the same under a different designation, the priests, ever prone to extravagance of word, soon began to attribute, regardless of strict propriety, every power to every god. With the exception of some of the older divinities, whose forms, as they are less complex, retain throughout the simplicity of their primitive character, few gods escaped this adoration, which tended to make them all universally supreme, each being endowed with all the attributes of godhead. One might think that no better fate could happen to a god than thus to be magnified. But when each god in the pantheon was equally glorified, the effect on the whole was disastrous. In fact, it was the death of the gods whom it was the intention of the seers to exalt. And the reason is plain. From this universal praise it resulted that the individuality of each god became less distinct; every god was become, so to speak, any god, so far as his peculiar attributes made him a god at all, so that out of the very praise that was given to him and his confreres alike there arose the idea of the abstract godhead, the god who was all the gods, the one god. As a pure abstraction one finds thus Aditi, as equivalent to 'all the gods,'[25] and then the more personal idea of the god that is father of all, which soon becomes the purely personal All-god. It is at this stage where begins conscious premeditated pantheism, which in its first beginnings is more like monotheism, although in India there is no monotheism which does not include devout polytheism, as will be seen in the review of the formal philosophical systems of religion. It is thus that we have attempted elsewhere[26] to explain that phase of Hindu religion which Müller calls henotheism.