Forlong - Rivers of Life

xxii
Preface.
what Vedas and Brâhmanas are to the ecclesiastics. Epiks soon assume their true
dimensions when we study them in presence of the people and the living faiths
which have grown out of them. He, of course, who has been cheated into
believing too much, is prone to rush into the opposite extreme, and this is
unfortunately true of some European. acholars whose school-day-dreamland of Troy
and its heroes has been too rudely dissipated by maturer knowledge. They are
then apt to surpass their forrner state of complete credulity by averring that there is not
in all these old writings even a residuum of truth, while the converse might almost be
stated; for there are always elements of genuine history in all the narrativea of
those startling epochs of a race which have thus called forth the true poet or even
fanatical teacher.
It has thus been rightly urged that a national myth has always a natural cause and
is not a mere invention; that many myths are history not yet developed and, when
ponderous, have some great facts at their base. It was at least by such means that
ancient men taught their fellows, and we must therefore no more despair of finding
and elucidating some true points of history im Indian epiks and other sacred writings
than in Western ones, nor any more dream of casting them aside than we would
the lists of Manetho or the cosmogonies of Hebrews and Kaldeans with all their gods
and heroes of fabulous age and deeds.
Let us be grateful for the quasi histories of Jaktan or Cahtan, Abram, Jacob,
Moses. Samson and Solomon, as well as of Pallas, Heraklês, Arjuna and Krishna,
though we may not at once discover in these legendary accounts any very reliable
history. Nay, let us go further, and admit as portion of the necessary study of man,
all his various ethereal beings or Sky-gods, for theso too were thought to dwell in a
manner among men, though, as a rule, they are kept very distinctly apart from
terrestrial humanity. There is no escaping such more or less spintual verities as Anu,
Hea and Bel, Osiris, Ra and Horus; Brahm, Vishnu and Siva; the Alê-im, Yahuê
and Adonis, Zeus and all his hosts; nor yet the feminine and neuter forms of these
rulers of the heavens and the earth.
Let it be our aim then to get below or behind these well defined but not really
primary potentialities, and to grasp the more radical forms and philological roots
which, whether of spiritual or material signifycance, are continually emerging from buried
palaces, slumbering libraries, tombs and tumuli. We hear them in echoes, more or
less strong, and often strangely symbolized as Ba, B’ra, Ra; Zî. Ti, Chi, Dzi, and Jê; Ā,
Yâ. Ān, Āb, Ad, Os, Us, Az, As, Ath, Es, Ish; Ār, Er, Ir, Il. El, Al and Allbs of mascu-