The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

Modern Theories 27
Nor is it a certain conclusion from the data we possess that
the early Aryan cultures — supposing the Celt, Teuton, Greek
and Indian to represent one common cultural origin, — were
really undeveloped and barbarous. A certain pure and high
simplicity in their outward life and its organisation, a certain
concreteness and vivid human familiarity in their conception of
and relations with the gods they worshipped, distinguish the
Aryan type from the more sumptuous and materialistic Egypto-
Chaldean civilisation and its solemn and occult religions. But
those characteristics are not inconsistent with a high internal
culture. On the contrary, indications of a great spiritual tradition
meet us at many points and negate the ordinary theory. The old
Celtic races certainly possessed some of the highest philosophical
conceptions and they preserve stamped upon them even to the
present day the result of an early mystic and intuitional development
which must have been of long standing and highly evolved
to have produced such enduring results. In Greece it is probable
that the Hellenic type was moulded in the same way by Orphic
and Eleusinian influences and that Greek mythology, as it has
come down to us, full of delicate psychological suggestions, is a
legacy of the Orphic teaching. It would be only consonant with
the general tradition if it turned out that Indian civilisation has
throughout been the prolongation of tendencies and ideas sown
in us by the Vedic forefathers. The extraordinary vitality of these
early cultures which still determine for us the principal types of
modern man, the main elements of his temperament, the chief
tendencies of his thought, art and religion, can have proceeded
from no primitive savagery. They are the result of a deep and
puissant prehistoric development.
Comparative Mythology has deformed the sense of man’s
early traditions by ignoring this important stage in human
progress. It has founded its interpretation on a theory which saw
nothing between the early savage and Plato or the Upanishads.
It has supposed the early religions to have been founded on the
wonder of barbarians waking up suddenly to the astonishing
fact that such strange things as Dawn and Night and the Sun
existed and attempting in a crude, barbaric, imaginative way to