Page 736 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

88 SAMAGRA TILAK -- 2 • CHALDEAN AND INDIAN VEDAS

worship were known to and had influenced the Mesopotamian
rulers in the fourteenth century before Christ. •
This takes us back to B. C. 1400 or 1500. But we can go still
further back and show, that the intercourse between Chadldea
and India existed from a time far anterior to the reign of the
Mitanic kings. M. Lenormant has justly observed that while
the Aryans worshipped the good and beneficient deities in nature,
the Mongolians ( to which race the Chaldeans belonged ) always
tried to propitiate the malevolent spirits; and hence while sacrifice
formed the main feature of the Vedic religion, magic and sorcery
was the main characteristic of the religion of the ancient Chat-
deans. Not that there were no Chaldean hymns to the sun-god,
but even these were used for magic purposes.t
This shrewd generalisation of the French savant at once
enables us to lay our hand upon the Atharva Veda, if we wish
to find any parallels to the Chaldean magic formulm in the Vedic
literature. The Vedic religion is very often called the trayi-dharma
or the religion based only on the three ancient and older Vedas.
The Atharva Veda finds no place amongst these three, and there
is an old tradition that in point of importance and authority the
Atharva does not stand on a par with the ~ig, the Yajus and the
Saman. Historically speaking it is now further ascertained that
the Atharva Veda is much more recent than the three other Vedas.
But though comparatively younger, we must at the same time
remember that even this recent Veda must be placed at least some
twenty-five centuries before Christ in as much as it is mentioned
by name and cited in the Brahma:Q.as and the Upani,hads.:t
If we therefore discover any names of Chaldean spirits or
demons the Atharva, it could only mean that the magic of the
Chaldeans was borrowed, partially at least, by the Vedic people
prior to the second millennium before Christ, and that this could
not have been done unless the Chaldean people were either the
neighbours of Vedic tribes or traded with them even in those
ancient days.

• H. Jacobi's paper in the joumal of the Royal Asiaftc Sodelj' for July
1909, pp. 721-726.
t Lenormant's Chaldean Magic, Engl. Trans. pp. 145f, 179 and 319.
t Bloomfield's Introduction to Atharva Veda inS. B. E. Vol. XLII.