The higher and more favoured strata of society will seldom be free from the desire to bequeath to posterity the advantages they possess; and this feeling makes itself felt with greater force in earlier stages of civilisation than in later. As the possessions and occupation of the father descend to the son who grows up in them, the favoured orders are inclined to maintain this natural relation, and elevate it into a legal rule; they believe that the qualification for their special calling depends on birth in it, or better blood, and make it so to depend. In the states on the Ganges these tendencies must have been the more strongly marked, as in this case the Aryas saw beneath them, in the Çudras, a class of men less capable and less cultivated than themselves; to descend to this class and mingle with it, seemed to them as disgraceful as it was dangerous to the maintenance of their empire over these men. Here it was more natural than elsewhere to pursue this analogy further – to regard even the classes of their own tribe, according to their more or less honourable occupation, as separate circles, as races having different characters and higher or lower gifts, and to transform these distinctions of occupation and social position into rigid castes. Thus the Kshatriyas, in the full consciousness of their aristocratic life, proud of their brave deeds and noble feeling, must have rendered difficult or impossible all approach to their occupation and order; they regarded the minstrels and the priests, and the Vaiçyas, as classes of inferior birth. When the minstrels had sung the praises of the ancient heroic age in the poem of the marvels of the heroes, in the Epos in its earliest form, and so arrived at more peaceful times in which everything no longer depended on the sword, a feeling of their importance and dignity must have grown up among the priests. Without them, without the accurate knowledge of the old songs and customs of sacrifice, as given by Manu and Pururavas, – without precise acquaintance with the prayers in which efficacy rested, efficient sacrifices could not be offered. We have already remarked that the amalgamation of the emigrant tribes, and the formation of the new kingdoms, brought the priests, who had hitherto belonged to the separate tribes, into closer connection and combination, and made them into a separate order. At the same time, their importance as preserving the old rites and the old faith tended to increase. The community thus arising between the priestly families led of necessity to an interchange of forms of prayer and invocations, of songs, and poems, and customs of sacrifice, the exclusive possession of which had hitherto belonged to each of these families or schools. Thus in each of the new states the priestly families attained a larger collection of songs, and a ritual which was the natural product of the liturgies of the various families, the observances regarded by one or other of these as traditional and indispensable. The traditional prayers and songs of praise were regarded as magical spells, of which even the gods could not escape the power. This exchange and combination of spells and rubrics of sacrifice no doubt made the ritual more complicated. The strictly-preserved and now extended possession of these prayers, invocations, and customs, which were known to the priests, separated that order from the Kshatriyas, and the Vaiçyas; they stood in opposition to the other orders, as the exclusive possessors of the knowledge of the customs of sacrifice, and efficient invocations. It was only among the members of this order that the correct observances and invocations were known; how could the Kshatriya or the Vaiçya avoid errors in his offering or invocation, such as would remove their efficacy and change them into their opposite? The constant increase of the prayers and forms accompanying every step in the sacrifice occupied more priests: the Hotar offered the invitation to the god to come down and receive the sacrifice; the Udgatar accompanied the preparation of the offering with the solemn forms and prayers; the Adhvaryu performed the actual rite.

Thus an equality of knowledge, advantage, and interests united the priests against the Kshatriyas, Vaiçyas, and Çudras. By the consciousness that they were in possession of the means to win the favour of the gods for the king, the nobles, and the people, the pious feeling aroused among them was greatly assisted towards gaining the recognition of the other orders. Like the Kshatriyas, they must have scorned to descend to the occupations of the Vaiçyas; they must have felt that only the priest born a priest could perform the priestly service, or offer pleasing sacrifice to the gods. They must have maintained that birth alone in the order could confer the capacity for so important and lofty a calling as theirs. If nobles and priests debarred the Vaiçyas from entrance into their order, their occupations, and modes of life, they must have been no less careful to maintain the advantages of their birth against the Çudras.

If the separation of the orders was the result of a natural progress, if the effort of the favoured classes to close their circles was essentially promoted by the common contrast of the immigrants to the remnant of the old population, the natural conditions in which the Aryas were placed on the Ganges were not without an influence on the maintenance of the separation when once introduced. In the land of the Indus the Aryas had not learned to endure such a climate and such heat as they found on the Ganges. The atmosphere began by degrees to undermine the active and vigorous feeling of the Aryas, to lead them to a life of greater calm and rest, which inclined them to retain the conditions and circumstances once introduced.

The orders attain complete exclusiveness and become castes when not only the change from one to another is forbidden, but when even marriage between the members of different orders is either impossible, or if allowed entails the loss of order, and other disadvantages. We do not exactly know to what extent the mutual exclusiveness of the Kshatriyas, the Brahmans, and the Vaiçyas was carried; we only know that these distinctions existed, and that marriages between the orders took place at the time when the priests succeeded in wresting the first place on the throne and in the state from the Kshatriyas, who had maintained it for centuries.

The priests would never have succeeded in raising themselves above the Kshatriyas and repressing the ancient pre-eminence of the armed nobility so closely connected with the kings, who belonged to their order, and were their born chiefs, had they not succeeded in convincing the people on the Ganges, that the effectual sacrifice was the most important and all-decisive act; that the position in which men stood to the gods was a matter far transcending all other relations. They must have transformed the old religious conceptions by a new doctrine, and by means of this transformation given to themselves a special position, with a peculiar sanction from above. This rise of the priesthood, and their elevation to the first order, is the decisive point in the development of the Arians in India. It was a revolution of Indian life, of the Indian state, of Indian history, of which the effects still continue. It has been observed that the peculiar relations of the tribes on the Ganges, and the nature of the land, tended to fix more strongly there than elsewhere the separation between the orders. But that this division is the sharpest known in history; that the orders became castes, sub-divided in turn into a number of hereditary under-castes; that this unnatural social system has continued in spite of the severest attacks and most violent shocks, and still does continue in unbroken force – this is due to a development of the religious views supplied by the priests, and to the position of the priesthood which was founded on this transformation. The victory over the Kshatriyas was the first step on this path. It was won by means of a new conception of the idea of God, and a scheme of the origin of the world, and the stages of created beings established thereon. On this foundation it was that the priests obtained the highest position.

When the priestly families on the Ganges passed beyond the borders of their several states in their contact with each other, they perceived the extent of the whole treasure of sacrificial song and forms of prayer, which the races had brought over in separate portions from the Indus. The confusing multitude of deities and their attributes, which now forced themselves upon the priests, led to the attempt to discover some unity in the mass. The astonishing abundance of conceptions and the number of the supreme deities in the old prayers were essentially due, as has already been pointed out, to the fact that the Indians desired to render to every god whom they invoked the proper and the highest honour. With this object the number of attributes was increased, and the god in question endowed to a greater or less degree with the power and peculiarities of other deities; and in order to win the favour of the deity to whom the sacrifice was offered, men were inclined to praise him as the highest and mightiest of all gods. This inclination was supported by the circumstance that the quick and lively fancy of the Indians never fixed the outlines of their deities or separated them as individuals, and further, by the blind impulse already noticed, to concentrate the power of the gods in one highest god, and seize the unity of the divine nature. Thus we saw that Indra and Agni, Mitra and Varuna, were in turns extolled as the highest deity. The task now before the priests was to understand the meaning of these old prayers, to grasp the point of agreement in these various invocations, the unity in these wide attributes, ascribed sometimes to one god and sometimes to another. This gave a strong impulse to the reflective mind of the Brahmans, and no sooner did the Indians begin to meditate than their fancy became powerful. The form of Indra, and the conception lying at the base of his divinity – the struggle against the black spirits of darkness – faded away in the land of the Ganges. In that region tempests do not come on with the same violence as in the Panjab; the hot season is followed by the rainy season and the inundation without any convulsions of the atmosphere. Again, as the life of war fell into the background, the position of Indra as a god of war and victory became less prominent. Least of all could the priests in a time of peace recognise the god of their order in the god of war, and in any case the national, warlike, heroic character of Indra could offer few points of contact with priestly meditation. If in consequence of the new circumstances and relations of life, Indra passed into the background – the old gods of light, the common possession of the Aryas in Iran and India, Mitra, Aryaman, Varuna, beside and above whom Indra had risen, were again allowed to come into prominence. The effort to grasp the unity of the divine power seemed to find a satisfactory basis in the form of Varuna, who from his lofty watch-tower beholds all things, is present everywhere, and sits throned in unapproachable light on the waters of heaven, and in the ethical conceptions embodied in the nature of this deity. The Brahmans struck out another path: they set aside altogether Aditi, i. e. the imperishable, who in the old poems of the Veda is the mother of the gods of light, i. e. of "the immortal" (p. 45, n. 2), and in other poems is extolled as the heaven and the firmament, as procreation and birth, as well as other attempts to conceive this unity. The effort to grasp the unity of the divine Being, the attempt to comprehend its nature, took quite another direction – highly significant and important for the character and development of the Indians.

The soma was offered most frequently to Indra, the Açvins, and the Maruts, and by it they are strengthened and nourished. The drink which gave strength to men and intoxicated them nourished and inspired the gods also in the faith of the Indians; it gave them strength, and thus won for men the blessing of the gods. To the Indians it appeared that a potency so effectual must itself be divine – a deity. Hence the soma itself is invoked as a god, and by consistently following out the conception, the Indians see in it the nourisher and even the creator of the gods. "The soma streams forth," we are told in some songs of the Rigveda, "the creator of heaven and the creator of earth, of Agni and of the sun, the creator of Indra and of thoughts." The soma-plants are now the "udders of the sky;" the god is pressed for the gods, and he is offered as drink, who in his liquor contains the universe.¹⁵⁷ The sacrificial drink which nourishes the gods, or the spirit of it, is thus exalted to be the most bountiful giver of blessings, the bravest warrior, the conqueror of darkness, the slayer of Vritra, the lord of created things, and even to be the supreme power over the gods, the creator of the sun, the creator and father of Indra and the gods;¹⁵⁸ and so the highest power could be ascribed with greater justice to the correct invocations, the efficacious prayers which, according to the ancient faith of the Indians, compelled the gods to come down to the sacrificial meal, and hear the prayers of men. If man could induce or compel the gods to obey the will of men, the means by which this operation was attained must of itself be obviously of a divine and supernatural character. Only a divine power can exercise force over the mighty gods. We saw above how the spirit of fire, which carried the offerings to the sky, was to the Indian the mediator between earth and heaven. But the gifts were accompanied by prayers, and these, according to the idealistic tendencies of the Indians and the opinion of their priests, were the most efficacious part of the sacrifice; in them was contained the elevation of the mind to heaven; and therefore to the Indian the priest was one who offered prayer; and the songs of the Veda lay the greatest weight on "the holy word," i. e. on the prayer, which with them "was the chariot which leads to heaven." Thus a second spirit was placed beside Agni, the bearer of gifts, and this spirit carried prayer into heaven, and was the means by which the priests influenced the gods, the power which compelled the gods to listen to them. This spirit is the personification of the cultus, the power of meditation. It lives in the acts of worship, in the prayers; it is the spirit which in these prayers is the constraining power upon the gods. In the faith of the Indians the gods grow by invocations and prayers; this spirit, therefore, gives them vigour and strength, and as he is able to compel the gods, he must himself be a mighty god.

This spirit of prayer is a creation of the priestly families, a reflected expression of that power and compulsion which from all antiquity the Indians believed could be exercised upon spirits, and which they attribute to the power of meditation. The name of this deity no less than his abstract nature is a proof of his later origin. He is called Brahmanaspati, i. e. lord of prayer. "Brahmanaspati," we are told in the Vedas, "pronounces the potent form of prayer, where Indra, Varuna, Mitra, and the gods have made their dwellings."¹⁵⁹ The lord of prayer, the leader of songs, the creator of the songs by which the gods grow, and who gives them power, the "bright, gold-coloured," has in reality done the deeds of Indra. "He has cleft the clouds with his lightning, opened the rich hollow of the mountains (the hidden streams), driven the cows from the mountains, poured forth streams of water, chased away the darkness with his rays, has brought into being the dawn, the clear sky, and fire."¹⁶⁰ Thus did the priests transfer the achievements of the old god of storm and battle to their new god, their own especial protector, whom they now make the possessor of all divine attributes, and the father of gods. As this spirit was concealed, and lived in the acts of sacrifice, in the priests who offered it, in their prayers and meditations, and, on the other hand, had a power over the gods, guiding them and compelling them, Brahmanaspati, the spirit of the cultus, the mysterious force, the magic power of the rite, became with the priests the Holy, an impersonal essence, which at last was looked on by the priests as "Brahman."¹⁶¹ It was not with the lightning, but with the Brahman, i. e. with the power of the Holy, that Indra burst asunder the cave of Vritra.¹⁶²

In Brahmanaspati the priests found a special god for their order and vocation; they were also at the same time carried beyond the circle of the ancient gods, whose forms had sprung up on a basis of natural powers; they had arrived at a transcendental deity emanating from the mysterious secret of their worship. It was a step further on the same path to resolve Brahmanaspati into Brahman, the Sacred Being. Nevertheless, even in the latest poems of the Veda, Brahman still coincides with Brahmanaspati, with the power of meditation and prayer.¹⁶³