Whilst the Trans-Himâlâyans, influenced by a gorgeous nature, allowed their imagination to run wild, and to distort the primitive mystic simplicity of these religious conceptions, the Cis-Himâlâyans remained more faithful to the first impressions of nature, and worshipped Light and Fire as the symbols of intellect, righteousness, and virtue, in opposition to Night, as the symbol of ignorance, injustice, and sin. To the triangular forms, the circle,
the serpent, was added, the form without beginning and end; no wonder that, encircling the equilateral triangle and joined to the square, it became the symbol of the mysterious, incomprehensible forces of nature. The triangle, square, and the circle
united, intersected, combined, isolated, and crossed, formed the fundamental lines of temples and their decorations. It was only at a later period that animal and monstrous human forms were conceived to personify abstract divine powers. The attributes of Ether, Water (Indra), and Fire (Agni), were transformed into acting persons. The three equal sides of the triangle, influenced by the imagination of the expounders of matters divine, were changed into an individual with three heads, so as to give a more comprehensible form to the incomprehensible divine power.
The Trans-Himâlâyans, once settled on the gigantic triangular peninsula stretching into the Indian Ocean, had leisure to work out a vast theogony, which has served the Aryans down to our own days as a store-house for different mythologies and religious systems.
The Divespiter of India (Deus pater, Jupiter) became the Lord of the sky, the Lord of hosts; his weapon was the thunderbolt. He possessed a splendid garden, the paradise, nandana.
Gânesa is Janus, the god with two heads. He was the guardian of ways; he had a rod or sceptre in his hand (the shepherd’s crook or crosier) and a key—symbolic of his power to enter upon all the important undertakings of mankind.
S’rî or S’rîs (Seris—Ceres), also Lakshmî, Padmâ, and Camalâ, was the goddess of abundance, sprung from the sacred Lotus.