Following downward the course of religious development, as reflected in the epic, one next finds traces of Brahmanic theology not only in the few passages where (Brahm[=a]) Praj[=a]pati remains untouched by sectarianism, but also in the harking back to old formulae. Thus the insistence on the Brahmanical sacredness of the number seventeen is preserved (xii. 269. 26; iii. 210. 20, etc); and Upanishadic is the "food is Praj[=a]pati" of iii. 200. 38 (Yama in 40). There is an interesting rehabilitation of the primitive idea of the Açvins in the new ascription of formal divinity to the (personified) Twilights (Sandhy[=a]) in iii. 200. 83, although this whole passage is more Puranic than epic. From the same source is the doctrine that the fruit of action expires at the end of one hundred thousand _kalpas_ (_ib._ vs. 121). One of the oddest religious freaks in the epic is the sudden exaltation of the Ribhus, the Vedic (season-gods) artisans, to the position of highest gods. In that heaven of Brahm[=a], which is above the Vedic gods' heaven, there are the holy seers and the Ribhus, 'the divinities of the gods'; who do not change with the change of _kalpas_ (as do other Vedic gods), III. 261. 19-23. One might almost imagine that their threefoldness was causative of a trinitarian identification with a supreme triad; but no, for still higher is the 'heaven of Vishnu' (vs. 37). The contrast is marked between this and _[=A]it. Br._ III. 30, where the Ribhus with some difficulty obtain the right to drink _soma_.