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Dravidians, together with his consort or “energic principle,” Durga. (His symbol was the cobra, hers the lion, while their son was Ganesa, elephant-headed, the god of learning. ) And as the southern kingdoms waxed strong, so their religion was pushed forward, steadily displacing Buddhism in its home-land as it in turn spread outward over the great continent of Asia; until the Deccan and Bengal returned to the earlier faith, while of the structure built up by Kanishka the White Huns had left but wreckage.
The religion of India as seen by the author of the Periplus was therefore twofold: at Barygaza under the Saka satraps, a heterodox Buddhism had supplanted the Law observed at Ujjeni and Pataliputta under the Mauryas, and preached to the nations of the earth under Asoka in the third century B. C. ; while the purer form still upheld by the Andhras could not be found at their western port, Calliena, which the Sakas had “obstructed.” In the south the earlier faith was advancing, and in Nelcynda, where some acquaintance related to our author the things he set down about the eastern half of India, it was the great epics which supplied the information ; the Puranas, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana , which continued to uphold the “southern sisters” in the use of that visible altar-flame which those of the north had thought to replace by contemplation of the “inner light,” but were learning anew their lesson from the Katha Upanishad : “that fire is day by day to be praised by men who wake, with the oblation.”
Underlying the formal acceptance of the Brahman faith there still existed the earlier animism, the worship of spirits in the form of trees and serpents, with all the train of associated beliefs described in such works as Fergusson, Tree and Serpent Worship-, Tylor, Primitive Culture-, Frazer, The Golden Bough-, W. Robertson Smith, The Reli- gion of the Semites ; Ernest Crawley, The Tree of Life. The identity of belief has been indicated by the legends attached to the most treas- ured articles of early trade. For international trade began largely on a religious basis, and was continued as a means of elaborating worship. And to the activity and persuasiveness of the commercial peoples may be attributed the wide acceptance of their assertions regarding the peculiar efficacy and sanctity of the spirits of their own sacred trees. There was no reason per se for the Egyptian faith in myrrh as a purify- ing and cleansing agent beyond the gum of their own trees, or for the trust of the Babylonians and Greeks in frankincense, or of the Romans in cinnamon, beyond their own pine-resin or the “golden bough” of their earlier faith; it was the result of the eclectic spirit which accepted that which was told them by strangers. The serpent-cult in Rome
