valley culture to the Ganges valley. The cult of the bull is common to the early cultures of Crete, of Egypt, of the Near East, of the Indus valley and of Hindu India, and it may here be pointed out that Przyluski⁴ suggests a non-Indo-European origin for the name of the god Vishnu and a Dravidian origin for the god himself.

The culture of the early civilization of northern India may perhaps be most conveniently described as pre-Rigvedic Hinduism. Even if this culture disappeared entirely from the Indus valley, it may well have survived across the Jumna with sufficient vigour to react to the Rig-vedic Aryans whose religious beliefs it ultimately submerged in its own philosophy. Slater⁵ has aptly pointed out that Krishna himself was of Naga descent, and the traditional blue colour in which Hindu art depicts him possibly represents the brunette colouring of the indigenes as distinguished on the one hand from the blond Aryans and on the other from the dusky aboriginals. Slater again points out that Sakra, the chief priest of the Asuras, is stated by the Mahabharata to have become 'the spiritual guide of both the Daityas and the Devas', thus recording the success of the pre-Rigvedic priestly class in imposing their spiritual authority on the Aryans also, and this same Sakra, or another one, according to the Vishnu Purana, said mantras for the success of the Asuras and restored to life the Danavas slain by Indra. His father was the rishi Bhrigu whose sons were Brahmans and priests of the Daityas. Clearly there were Brahmans before the Rigvedic Aryans, and we must look for the origin of that caste partly no doubt in the priests of the presumably Dravidian-speaking civilization who may well have shared the mathematical and astronomical knowledge of contemporary Babylonia.

It seems generally to happen that people with a matrilineal system substitute a patrilineal one where the two systems come into contact, and it is likely that the change from a matrilineal to a patrilineal system started to take place in upper India as a result of immigration, while it is not unlikely that the same process tended to substitute the worship of male for female deities. The practice of Hinduizing the female village deities of southern India by providing them with orthodox male husbands from the official Hindu pantheon is still perhaps going on. In Madura the fish-eyed goddess Minakshi is annually so married with great pomp and écht, but in the villages the goddess is still the real deity, and protectress of the people, rather than the recognized Hindu gods. So also in Bengal the Dharma-puja-paddhati records that Adyā the mother of the gods was married to Shiva with 'traditional ceremonies not enjoined in the Shastras

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⁴ Archiv Orientálni, IV, 2 August 1932, vide Indian Antiquary, January 1933.

⁵ Dravidian Element in Indian Clture, pp. 55 sqq.