It was not in the sphere of religion or worship, but in ethics, that the doctrine of the priests attained to a thorough practical influence on the state and life of the Indians, and this complete victory was due to the consequences which the priests derived from it for the life of the soul after death. We are acquainted with the ancient ideas cherished by the Aryas in the Panjab on the future of the soul after death; the spirits of the brave and pious passed into the bright heaven of Yama, where they lived in happiness and joy on soma, milk, and honey; those who had done evil passed into thickest darkness. Yama allowed or refused entrance into his heaven; his two hounds kept watch (p. 64). The descendants duly sprinkled water for the spirits of their ancestors, and their families brought libations at the new moon, when the souls of the fathers came in troops and enjoyed food and drink. In the oldest Brahmanas, Yama holds a formal judgment on the souls. The actions of the dead were weighed in a balance; the good deeds allowed the scale to rise; the evil deeds were threatened with definite punishments and torments in the place of darkness. The body of light which the pious souls are said to have received in heaven, required, according to this new conception, a less amount of food, or no food at all. But the deeper change rests in the fact that the heaven of Yama, the son of the deity of light, can now no longer be the reward of those who have lived a purer life, and approached to the sanctity and perfection of Brahman. They had raised themselves in the scale of existence, and must therefore return into the bosom of the pure being from which they had emanated. The souls which have attained to complete purity pass after death into Brahman. Thus the heaven of Yama was rendered unnecessary, and was, in fact, set aside. The sinner who has not lived according to the vocation which he received at birth, has neither offered sacrifice nor purified himself, must be severely punished, and it is Yama – now transformed from a judge of the dead into a prince of darkness, and having his abode in hell – who imposes on sinners the torments which they must endure after death for their guilt. The fancy of the Indians depicted, in great detail, according to the various torments, the place of darkness, the hell, situated deep below the earth. As among the Egyptians, and all nations living in a hot climate, so in the hell of the Indians fierce heat is the chief means of punishment. In one place is the region of darkness, and the place of tears, the forest where the leaves are swords. In another the souls are torn by owls and ravens; in another their heads are struck every day by the guardians of hell with great hammers. In another and yet worse hell they are broiled in pans; here they have to eat hot coals; there they walk on burning sand and glowing iron; in another place hot copper is poured into their necks.¹⁶⁹ For the kings and warriors, on the other hand, the heaven of Indra takes the place of the heaven of Yama; and into this the brave warriors enter. In the Epos, Indra laments that "none of the beloved guests come, who dedicate their lives to the battle, and find death without an averted countenance." We have already seen how Indra meets Yudhishthira in order to conduct him into the heaven of the heroes, the imperishable world, where he will see his brothers and his wife, when they are freed from the earthly impurity still clinging to them.

The torments provided in hell for the sinners could not satisfy the system which the priests had established in the doctrine of the world-soul. In this the holy and pure being had allowed the world to emanate from itself; the further this world was removed from its origin and source, the more melancholy and gloomy it became. If the gods, the holy and pious men in the past, and the heaven of light of Indra, were nearest to the purity of Brahman, the pure nature of this being became seriously adulterated in the lower stages of removal. In the present world, purity and impurity, virtue and passion, wisdom and folly, were at least in equipoise. The worlds of animals, plants, and dead matter were obviously still further removed from the pure Brahman. If, according to this view, the world was an adulterated, broken, impure Brahman, it received, along with this corruption, the duty of regaining its original purity. All beings had received their origin from Brahman, and to him all must return. From this point of view, and the requirement that every being must work out its way to perfection, in order to be adapted to its perfect origin, the priests arrived at the idea that every creature must go through all the gradations of being as they emanated from Brahman, before it could attain to rest. The Çudra must become a Vaiçya, the Vaiçya a Kshatriya, the Kshatriya a Brahman, and the Brahman a wholly sinless and sacred man, a pure spirit, before he can pass into Brahman. From the necessity that every one should work up to Brahman, arose the monstrous doctrine of regenerations. The Çudra who had lived a virtuous life, was, it was thought, by the power of this virtue and the practice of it, changed in his nature, and born anew in the higher existence of a Vaiçya; the Kshatriya became a Brahman, and so on.¹⁷⁰ In this manner the pure and holy life, according as it was freed from all sensuality and corporeality, from the whole material world, succeeded in winning a return to supersensual and incorporeal Brahman. Conversely, the impure, spotted, and sinful were born again in a lower order, and in the worst shape according to the measure of the offence – sometimes they did not even become men at all, but animals – in order to struggle back again through unutterable torments, and innumerable regenerations, to their former condition, and finally to Brahman. Thus a wide field was opened to the fancy of the Indians, on which it soon erected a complete system of regenerations; and into this the theory of hell was adopted. The man who had committed grievous sins, sinks after death into hell, and for long periods is tortured in the various departments there, that thus, after expiation of his sins, he may begin again the scale of migration from the lowest and worst form of existence. One who was guilty of less serious offences was born again according to their measure as a Çudra or an elephant, a lion or a tiger, a bird or a dancer.¹⁷¹ One who had committed acts of cruelty was re-born as a beast of prey.¹⁷² One who had attempted the murder of a Brahman was punished in hell one hundred or a thousand years, according to the progress of the attempt, and then saw the light of the world in twenty-one births, each time proceeding from the body of some common animal. He who had shed the blood of a Brahman, was torn in hell by beasts of prey for so many years as the flowing blood had touched grains of sand; and if any one had slain a Brahman his soul was born again in the bodies of the animals held in greatest contempt on the Ganges, the dog and the goat.¹⁷³ If any one had stolen a cow he was born again as a crocodile, or a lizard; if corn, as a rat;¹⁷⁴ if fruits and roots, as an ape.¹⁷⁵ He who defiled his father's bed was to be born a hundred times as a herb, or a liana – the creepers embracing the trees;¹⁷⁶ the Brahman who is guilty of a fault in the sacrifice is born again for a hundred years as a crow or kite, and those who eat forbidden food will again see light as worms. He who reproaches a free man with being the son of a slave-woman, will himself be born five times from the body of a slave.¹⁷⁷ In this manner, partly fanciful, partly pedantic, the priests built up the system of regenerations. According to the law-book of the priests, inorganic matter, worms, insects, frogs, rats, crows, swine, dogs, and asses, were on the lowest stage in the scale of creation; above them came first, elephants, horses, lions, boars, the Çudras and the Mlechhas; i. e. the nations who did not speak Sanskrit. Above these were rogues, players, demons (Raksheras), Piçachas, i. e. blood-suckers, vampyres; above these wrestlers and boxers, dancers, armour-smiths, drunkards, and Vaiçyas; above them the Kshatriyas and the kings, the men eminent in battle and speech, the genii of heaven, the Gandharvas and Apsarasas. Above these were the Brahmans, the pious penitents, the gods, the great saints, and finally, Brahman.

Thus the new system effaced the specific distinctions between plants and beasts, men and gods. Everywhere it saw nothing but spirits, which have to work their way in a similar manner from greater or less impurity to purity, from incompleteness to completeness and the original source of their existence. The souls, when they had once been created and had emanated from Brahman, found no rest or end till they had returned once more to this their starting-point; and this they were unable to do till they had been raised to the purity and sanctity of Brahman.

However indifferent the kings, nobles, and peasants may have been to this doctrine of the world-soul and Brahman, these new, severe, and terrible consequences, derived from it by the priests for the life after death, could not be without a deep impression. They operated with immense force on the spirit of the Indians. To endure the torments of hell in continuous heat, while even on earth the warmth of the climate was so hard to bear, was a terrible prospect. But even this appeared only as the lesser evil. Along with and after the torments of hell those who committed grievous sins had to expect a ceaseless regeneration in the bodies of men and animals until they had worked their way up to Brahman. At the same time the priests took care to impress upon the hearts of the people the fate which awaited those who did not follow their ordinances. They reminded them perpetually of "the casting of the soul into hell and hell-torments." The sinner was to think, "what migrations the soul would have to undergo owing to his sin; of the regeneration through ten thousand millions of mothers."¹⁷⁸ These endless terrors and torments now in prospect for the man who did not fulfil the vocation assigned to him by the creator at birth, or the prescripts of the priests, were only too well adapted to win respect for their requirements. Who would venture to trespass on the divine arrangement of the world, according to which the first place was secured on earth to the Brahman in preference to the wealthy armed noble, the peasant, and the miserable Çudra, who was only on a level with the higher order of animals? Who would not look up with reverence to the purer incarnation of the world-soul, the holier spirit, which dwelt in the Brahmans? Even though the theory of the world-soul remained unintelligible to the many, they understood that the Brahmans, who busied themselves with sacrifice, prayers, and sacred things, stood nearer to the deity than they did; they understood that if they misconducted themselves towards the sacred race or disregarded the vocation of birth, they must expect endless torments in hell, and endless regenerations in the most loathsome worms and insects, or in the despised class of the Çudras – "those animals in human form."

The priesthood cannot have succeeded in making good their claims to superiority over the Kshatriyas, their new doctrine and ethics, without long-continued struggles and contests. If the two first centuries after the foundation of the states – the period between 1400 and 1200 B.C. – were occupied, as we assumed above, with the arrangement and consolidation of the new kingdom, the establishment of the position of the nobles, and the composition of songs of heroism and victory, we may assign to the next two centuries – from 1200 to 1000 B.C. – the sharper distinction of the Kshatriyas and Vaiçyas, the amalgamation of the families of minstrels and priests into an order; the rise of this order in the states on the Ganges as the preserver of the ancient faith and ancient mode of worship; the combination of the customs, formulæ, and invocations hitherto handed down separately in the separate states. If in the first period the immigrant Aryas separated themselves as a common race from the Çudras, in the next the three orders of the Aryas became distinguished. Only the man who was born a Kshatriya could partake in the honour of this order; only one who sprung from a family of priests could be allowed to assist in the holy acts of sacrifice; and he who was born a Vaiçya must continue to till the field.

At the beginning of the ensuing century —i. e. in the period from 1000 B.C. downwards – the priests, now in possession of all the ancient invocations and formulæ, may have begun their meditations with the comparison of the invocations, the attempt to find out the right meaning of them, and to grasp the unity of the divine nature. The hymns of the latest portion of the Vedas, which are obviously a product of these meditations, may perhaps have arisen in the first half of this period. From the mysterious secret of the worship, the spirit of prayer, and the idea of the mighty, ever-recurring stream of birth and decay in the land of the Ganges, the Brahmans arrived at the idea of Brahman, the world-soul, and from this deduced its consequences. We may with certainty presuppose a long and severe struggle of the nobles against the dominion of the priests – a struggle which went on for several generations. Even the Vaiçyas can hardly have submitted without resistance to all the requirements of the Brahmans. The impassable gulf between the orders, the exclusion of intermarriage, was only carried out, as we can show, with difficulty; and even the ethics of the new doctrine must have met with resistance.

We have already referred to the circumstances which rendered victory easier to the Brahmans, to the changed conditions of life, and the nature of the land of the Ganges. Another fact in their favour was that the new doctrines of the Brahmans did not attack the monarchy. This continued to remain in the order of the Kshatriyas, and no essential limitation of their powers was required by the new doctrine from the princes on the Ganges. It is true that it demanded recognition of the superiority of the Brahmans to the other orders, and acknowledgment of the special sanctity of the order even from the kings; it required reverence, respect, and liberality, towards the Brahmans; yet in all other respects the new system was calculated to increase rather than diminish the power of the kings. The rule of unconditional submission to the existing order must have strengthened considerably the authority of the kings, and assisted them in removing the limitations hitherto, without doubt, imposed upon them by the importance of the Kshatriyas; and we can hardly avoid the conclusion that the kingdom on the Ganges was first raised by the new doctrine to absolute power; on this foundation it became a despotism.

We may feel confident in assuming that the victory of the Brahmans in the land of the Ganges was completed about the time when the dynasty of the Pradyotas ascended the throne of Magadha, i. e. about the year 800 B.C.¹⁷⁹ The districts from the Sarasvati eastward as far as the upper Ganges are after that time a sacred land to the Indians. The country between the Sarasvati and the Drishadvati is called Brahmavarta, i. e. Brahma-land. Kurukshetra (between the Drishadvati and the Yamuna), the districts of the Bharatas and Panchalas, of the Matsyas and Çurasenas, i. e. the entire doab of the Yamuna and the Ganges, are comprised under the name Brahmarshideça, i. e. the land of the holy sages. Here were situated the famous residences of the Kurus and Pandus, Hastinapura, Indraprastha, Kauçambi, and on the confluence of the Yamuna and Ganges, Pratishthana; here, finally, was the city of Krishna, Krishnapura, and the sacred Mathura on the Yamuna; and elsewhere also in this district we find consecrated places and shrines of pilgrimage. It is maintained that the bravest Kshatriyas and the holiest priests are to be found in this district; the customs and observances here are regarded as the best, and as giving the rule to the remainder. The law-book of the priests requires that every Arya shall learn the right walk in life from a Brahman born in Brahmarshideça, and that, properly, all Aryas should live there.¹⁸⁰ It cannot have been any reminiscence of the great war which caused the priests to set such a value on these regions, and make these demands, nor even the fact that these districts were the first occupied by the emigrants from the Indus, so that here first in the new country were consecrated places set up for the worship of the immigrants, and the least intermixture took place with the ancient population. It is due rather to the fact that in these regions the civilisation and culture of the Indians were consolidated in an especial degree; here the priestly reform of the religion, if it did not receive the first impulse, yet acquired the victory and became supreme, owing perhaps to the support of the princes of the dynasty of Pandu, who reigned at Kauçambi. As these were the regions in which the priests first regulated the ancient customs of worship, morals, and justice according to the new doctrine, they could afterwards serve as a pattern for all the rest. If the Brahmans, soon after they had succeeded in carrying through their demands here, revised the Epos of the great war in the light of their new system, they could claim the thanks of the kings of the Bharatas for their support, they could show that the kings who in ancient times had won the dominion in these lands, the ancestors of the race then on the throne, had even in early times obediently followed the commands of the priests, and they could set up the conquerors in that struggle as patterns of the proper conduct of kings to Brahmans (p. 101).