Comparative Religion — Key Ideas to Explore

ermes was the guardian of the spirits of the departed, whom he conducted {10} to the judgment in the under-world. In this respect, then, Hermes and Michael were akin. But Hermes also played many other parts, and the Greeks identified him with the Egyptian Thoth. When the destinies of Hector and Achilles were weighed against each other, ere the last mortal combat, the vase-painter could represent Hermes as holding the balance in the presence of Zeus, much as Thoth had presided over it before Osiris. The Etruscan artists depicted Mercury, the Italian equivalent of Hermes, fulfilling the same function. True, the purport of the test was different. But the symbol was the same; and when Hermes gave place to Michael, as Christianity was carried to the West, the scales passed from the Hellenic to the Jewish Christian figure, though they had in the one case been used to decide the allotment of fate, and in the other were employed for judgment. Why they remained so long unused in Christian symbolism is obscure. The revival of intercourse with the East through the Crusades may have given new force to the idea as part of the great judgment-process; and the figure to which it was most natural to assign it was that of Thoth-Hermes-Michael.

The religion of the ancient Hindus was founded, as every one knows, upon the venerable hymns collected into one sacred book under the name of the Rig Veda. These hymns, 1017 in number, containing over {11} 10,000 verses, are now arranged in ten books, twice the number of the divisions of the Hebrew Psalter. Like most of the Psalms they are traditionally ascribed to different poets, in whose families they were sung; and their authors were regarded as Rishis, bards, or sages. Of their real origin nothing is definitely known; their composition probably extends over many generations, perhaps over several centuries; and dim suggestions of their super-earthly origin already appear in some of the latest poems. They became the peculiar treasure of the priestly order; the most laborious efforts were devised for the study and preservation of the sacred text; the methods of pronunciation, the rules of grammar, the principles of metre, the derivations of words, were all elaborated with the utmost minuteness into different branches of Vedic lore. Two other smaller Vedas, collections of sacrificial formulæ and hymns, were very early placed beside the main work, and a fourth collection gained similar rank much later. With the development of the great schools of Hindu philosophy, especially after the decline of Buddhism, the whole question of authority as the foundation of belief and reasoning was forced to the front, and this in due time was applied to the Veda. Brahmanical speculation had been long concerned with its divine origin. It sprang from one of the mysterious figures in which the ancient theologians expressed their sense of the real {12} unity of the heavenly powers, Prajāpati, the "lord of creatures," through the medium of Vach, or sacred Speech. As such it was "the firstborn in the universe." But as proceeding from Prajāpati it issued from the world of the _an-anta_, the "un-ending" or "infinite," which was likewise the sphere of the _a-mrita_, the "im-mortal" or "deathless." So it belonged to the realm of the eternal, where it could be beheld, not indeed with the eye of sense, but with the higher discernment of the holy Seer. The philosophical schools occupied themselves accordingly with the defence of the eternity and consequent infallibility of the Veda. Elaborate arguments were devised to explain the relation of words to things, and of sound in the abstract to uttered speech or again to show how behind individuals which had their origin in time there existed species (even of the gods) which belonged to the timeless order transcending our experience. So the conclusion was reached, in the words of the great philosopher Çankara (A.D. 788-820), that "the authority of the Veda with regard to the matters stated by it is independent and direct; just as the light of the sun is the direct means of our knowledge of form and colour."