with the beliefs in the external soul and in life-essence discussed below, inasmuch as the king contains or represents the life principle of the community he rules. Like the cult of the snake, the transmigration of souls too appears to be a doctrine in no way typical of northern religions, in which the dead live on underground, and Fustel de Coulanges has pointed out¹¹ that it is not a feature of any northern religion though it has survived and been incorporated in them from the more ancient religions of Greece and Italy. Ancestor worship again is very strong in India, and this, too, would appear foreign to northern European religion, and indeed it is almost impossible that nomads should be ancestor worshippers, and the Aryan invasion, so-called, was probably an invasion of steppe-dwelling tribes, pastoral in habit and still nomadic. Cremation they may have brought in, and if so, they gave it a social cachet which is still leading to its gradual adoption by tribes which have previously practised burial or exposure, but it seems much more likely that the Rigvedic Aryans buried their dead and adopted cremation from the inhabitants whom they conquered. . . . Khandava and the slaughter of serpents in the Mahabharata. Vishnu, apparently a post-Rigvedic god, is perhaps the fruit of the reaction of what we may call proto-Hinduism to the Rigvedic invaders, as also the present ascendancy of male over female conceptions of the deity, and Przyluski ascribes a Dravidian origin to the name 'Vishnu'.¹² At the same time Vishnu would seem to have some associations with religious beliefs which must be regarded as represented chiefly in beliefs yet surviving among primitive tribes. Indra apparently is himself declared in the Mahabharata to be guilty of brahmanicide in killing Vrtra and Namuci who were Danavas, though the Rigveda praises him for the same deed. Pargiter adduces considerable evidence to show that the true Brahman families were of pre-Rigvedic origin, and that the Aryan kings of Madhyadesha were their own priests and in the earliest times had no Brahmans. Strabo remarks that it is recorded that 'The Indians worshipped Zeus Ombrios, the river Ganges, and the indigenous gods', ¹³ and as Zeus Ombrios is clearly Indra, the thunder god, the suggestion that the other gods worshipped are of indigenous origin is probably very near to the truth, and the traditional view that the Hindu religion is a growth entirely subsequent to the Rigveda, or rather to the Rigvedic invasions, is no longer tenable. Rai Bahadur Ramaprasad Chanda, in a paper on the 'Non-vedic Elements in Brahmanism',¹⁴ has made a number of points which indicate the

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¹¹ La Cité Antique, pp. 7 sq.

¹²Archiv Orientálni, IV, p. 2 (August 1932).

¹³ 'tous egchorious daimonas, bk. xv, p. 718.

¹⁴MS. (unpublished?) in the author's possession.