In contra-distinction to these Northern conceptions of the deities and religions is the Southern conception such as has been outlined in a former chapter. The Ŗg Veda supposes a pantheon of thirty-three gods, and the elaborate mythology connected with these gods could not have been conceived by the Tamil poet who shows himself realistic and concrete. If we could assess accurately the extent to which Āryan ideas and religion affected Cankam literature, the remaining non-Āryan portion might show realism as one of its main characteristics. Tamil concepts too were anthropomorphic, but they never revelled in the riotous imagery and personification that Āryan theogony and cosmogony supposed. The ancient Tamils did not ascribe a divine origin to their kings till Āryan imagery was introduced in a later period; they never ascribed a divine origin to their mountains and rivers till later poets, associated them with the Himƒlayas or the Ganges; they did not have the Vedic sacrifices and the fire-cult till they were introduced by the Āryan sacerdotal caste from the North. Their offerings to their gods were the produce of the hills, the produce of their flocks. They offered millets, the blood of rams, honey, or toddy, but anything like the literature that has grown around Soma and Agni did not grow among them. Early Vedic literature knows nothing of the Pūjā ritual, namely, the offering of flowers and leaves and fruits. The ritual was in all likelihood Dravidian, and it is oft-quoted lines of the Bhagavad-Giītā that form the great charter for the adoption of Dravidian ritual by Vedic Brahminism.4 "If anyone ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 4 S. K. CHATTERJI, Race Movements and Prehistoric Culture, in Vedic Age, London, 1951, p. 160: "The characteristic offerings in the Puja rite, viz., flowers, leaves, fruits, water etc., are not known to the homa rite, except in instances where it has been influenced by the puja. It has been suggested with good reason that puja is the pre-Aryan, in all likelihood the Dravidian form of worship, while the homa is the Aryan: and throughout the entire early Vedic Literature, the puja ritual with flowers, etc. offered to an image or symbol is unknown. The word puja, from a root puj, appears, like the thing it connotes, to be of Dravidian origin also. This word or root is not found in any Aryan or Indo-European language outside India. Professor Mark Collins suggested that the Sanskrit word puja (from which the root puj was deduced later) was |