[CHAPTER VI
Mysteries of Creation, the World's Ages, and Soul Wandering]
The World Soul—Vedic Hymn of Creation—Brahmă the only Reality—Doctrine of the Upanishads—Creation Myths—The Chaos Egg in India and Egypt—Ancestor Worship—Celestial Rishis and Manus—Influence of Folk Religion—Imported Doctrines—The Yugas or Ages of the Universe—Ape God's Revelations—The Ages in Greek and Celtic Mythologies—Universal Destruction—A Deathless Sage—His Account of the Mysteries—Narayana the Creator and Destroyer—Transmigration of Souls—Beliefs in India, Egypt, Greece, and among the Celts.
Before the Vedic Age had come to a close an unknown poet, who was one of the world's great thinkers, had risen above the popular materialistic ideas concerning the hammer god and the humanized spirits of Nature, towards the conception of the World Soul and the First Cause—the “Unknown God”. He sang of the mysterious beginning of all things:
There was neither existence, nor non-existence,
The kingdom of air, nor the sky beyond.
What was there to contain, to cover in—
Was it but vast, unfathomed depths of water?
There was no death there, nor Immortality.
No sun was there, dividing day from night.
Then was there only that, resting within itself.
Apart from it, there was not anything.
At first within the darkness veiled in darkness,
Chaos unknowable, the All lay hid.
Till straightway from the formless void made manifest
By the great power of heat was born that germ.