& CHAPTER FOUR THE HEALING GODS OF ANCIENT INDIA PART I: GENERAL SURVEY The Aryans and disease. MONG the Aryans of Ancient India, disease was considered a manifestation of the will or power A of some supernatural being. It might be from the gods in punishment for sin, as in the case of dropsy caused by Varuna; or it might be due to a mere caprice of a malevolent deity. From the earliest times, all morbid conditions of the mind and body-except such as were regarded as divine vengeance-were believed to result from attacks or possession of evil spirits which surrounded man on every side. A cure could be effected only by propitiating, appeasing, or expelling them; and the gods were appealed to for assistance through the use of Vedic hymns, prayers, and sacrifices. Often the gods were vague and uncertain, and the people, believing that magic acts and words had power to compel the gods to perform the will of man, mingled the arts of magic and sorcery with their religious ritual and practices. The Vedas. These beliefs were a part of the religion of the ancient Aryans of India as contained in their oldest records, the Vedas (knowledge), the ancient sacred literature of India. Of these, the Rigveda, the earliest, though often ascribed to the early date of 2000-3000 B.C., is now generally supposed to have been begun about 1500 B.C., and parts are believed to have originated as late as 300 B.C. The Vedas also contained the germs of many of the most important and time-honored myths and legends of the Indians, and these were closely interwoven with their religious beliefs. They taught the worship of the chief energies of nature, which are represented as superior and supernatural beings, personified and ranked as the greater gods. There were inferior deities, representing the more routine phenomena of nature and other functions in a descending scale, besides a host of other spirits and demons, greater and lesser, but below the rank of gods, whose activities more nearly concerned the common people and their affairs for weal or woe. These received scant consideration in the more strictly religious literature and are treated with much more detail in the myths and legends of the Sanskrit epics and in classical Indian literature.1 The pantheon. The great gods, whose noble and miraculous deeds had brought all the benefits of nature to man, were celebrated in the Vedic hymns of praise. However real and active they were in the beginning, the results of their beneficence had long been in the possession of the people. Although they were anthropomorphic, they were not sympathetic. They concerned themselves less and less with the affairs of men and finally became abstractions increasingly distant and more vague. Thus the religion of the Rigveda, which found expression in hymns of praise and adoration, intermingled, in its later portions, with naïve speculations of things divine and human and with mythical tales, gradually faded as a vital force. It gave place to sects characterized by lofty conceptions, philosophical speculations, metaphysical abstractions, 1 A. A. Macdonell, "Vedic Religion," in ERE xii, 601-618. refinements of the 'Unknowable,' beliefs "so abstract that they escape the grasp of the most speculative intellect." From its inception, Brahmanism inherited the myths, legends, and gods of the old Vedic literature. The great gods were theoretically the same, but as the Brahman priests gained control of the sacrificial interests, the ancient deities lost their pristine dignity and, while still considered powerful, their share in the popular worship became less. By the same influences, the lesser deities faded and ceased to appeal strongly to the people. Their aspect changed. Some were regarded as separate from the Vedic divinities, or became demigods and godlings. Many of the older deities were forgotten or survived only in name, and their cults were absorbed by later sectarian gods; some of them were adopted from the aborigines whom the Aryans had conquered. Thus the places of the ancient divinities were taken by new ones, a host of minor deities and departmental gods of tribes and villages, who became anthropomorphic through the hands of the poets of the epics. Polytheism became sectarian and more extensive. The later Buddhists made the polytheistic Brahman pantheon a nucleus and created new deities representing the forces of nature and abstract conceptions of religion, incorporated the pantheons outside of India, and formed the basis for the extension of a 'worldreligion.' The early Hindu period. The higher classes of the priesthood and of the laity devoted themselves to lofty metaphysical speculation, dealing with the prospects of happiness in the future life and with abstractions of higher truths. The common people, on the other hand, were personally engaged in counteracting the machinations of the hosts of evil spirits who infested their lives and threatened them on every side with misfortune, famine, epidemics, individual disease, |