DEITIES AND WORSHIP Contained in the ALBERT PIKE 1872 19 in THE
STA3STDABJ3 PRINTINO CO. Louisville CopyrigU, 1930, by The Supreme
Council, 33, Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, for
the Southern Jurisdiction of the United States of America PREFACE.
It. is quite uncertain, now that I have this book finished, whether
I shall ever care to publish it. It was not commenced for that
purpose and it may always remain a monotype, in manuscript. For it
has been written as a study, and not as a teaching for myself and
not for others. It is not at all the fruit of a meditated purpose,
and was not commenced as a diagnosis of the Deities of the Veda, an
attempt to discover the distinctive personality and individuality
of each, which it afterwards became, and the fruits of itself to
myself have been sufficient to reward me abundantly for the labour
it has cost. Nothing has ever so much interested me, as this
endeavour to penetrate into the adyta of the ancient Aryan thought,
to discover what things, principles or phenomena our remote
ancestors worshipped as Gods, what Indra, Varuna, Mitra, Aryaman,
the Agvins, Vayu, Vishnu, SavitJfi and the others really were, in
the conception of the composers of the Vedic hymns. It has had a
singular charm for me, this inquiry into the true mean ing of the
epithets and phrases, often, in appearance, indiscriminately
applied to different Deities, often seemingly inappropriate, and
the expres sions of a wild and riotous imagination into the true
meaning of names and epithets and phrases that became, literally
accepted and misunderstood, the sources, seeds or germs of the
legendary myths and many of the Deities of the Grecian mythology
and theBrahmanic fables and pantheon. And I have felt the most
intense satisfaction in deciphering, as it seemed to me I did,
these hieroglyphs of ancient Aryan thought in bringing myself into
relation en rapport with these old Poets and Philosophers, under
standing them in part, and thinking with them in deciphering their
hiero glyphics, infinitely better worth the labour than all that
are engraved on the monuments of Egypt and Assyria, and in solving
one by one the enigmas contained in their figurative and seemingly
extravagant language, whose meaning was only to be discovered by
beginning with their simplest notions and conceptions, and making
the curious processes of their thought my own trying as it were, to
be them, intellectually, and to think their thoughts. Thus I
satisfied myself that every one of their Deities had for them a
perfectly distinct and dear personality and individuality that
their ideas were not in the least vague, incoherent or confused
that their imagination was perfectly - ell-regulated, and that
every epithet and phrase was logically appropriate and correct. So
also, upon a partial examination, I found it to be in the ancient
Zarathustrian G tMs, which are, I do not doubt, even older than the
Vedic hymns. I found in both, the most profound philosophic or
metaphysical ideas, which those of every philosophy and religion
have merely developed and that, so far from being Barbarians or
Savages, the old Aryan herdsmen and husbandmen, in the Indus
country under the Himalayan Mountains, on the rivers of Bactria,
and, long before, on the Scythic Steppes where they originated,
were men of singularly clear and acute intellects, profound thought
and an infinite reverence of thebeings whom they worshipped. The
inquiry has opened to me an entirely new chapter of the history of
human thought, and given me an infinitely higher conception of the
Aryan intellect...
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