PREFACE. IN N the portions of the Indian Antiquities already published, the religious rites anciently celebrated in consecrated groves and caverns, and in temples formed after the model of those groves and caverns, have been successfully investigated. The physical theology of India, and not of India only, but of Egypt, Persia, and Greece, has been also in a great measure developed. To unfold the purer and more arcane principles of devotion pre. vailing in those respective nations, principles, for the most part, locked up in the bosom of the A 4 the price and the philosopher, is the object of 'n paricular volume, in which the ORIENTAL TRADE OF DEITY are extensively discussed, and referred to what I cannot but conceive to Lase been the true source of them all, to certais mutilated traditions of a nobler doctrine, revealed to man in a state of innocence. As we advance still farther in these Indian Researches, we shall find many other important points of religious belief surprisingly elucidated; and thus the Mosaic records and Christianity, so far from being subverted by the pretended antiquity of the Brahmins, will derive a proud trophy from the corroborative testimony of their genuine annals and the congenial sentiments of their primeval creed. On the vaunting claims to unfathomable antiquity of that race, whose astronomical calculations, and the mythology interwoven with it, have been mistaken for true histories, Voltaire first, and afterwards Bailly and Volney, have principally founded those false and impious systems which have plunged a great nation into the abyss of atheism, and all its consequent excesses and miseries. The subject coming immediately before me at the very commencement of this undertaking, and the circumstances of the times demanding it, I have entered more extensively into the vast field of Eastern theology than I originally intended, perhaps to the total ruin of those just hopes of profit which I was taught to expect from so laborious an undertaking. When, however, the reader is informed, that the creation of the world, according to the Hindoo cosmogony, was effected by an incumbent spirit, the emanation of Deity, impregnating with life the primordial waters of chaos; that the fall of man from a state of primeval purity and innocence in the Satya Yug, or perfect age, forms the basis of the Indian Metempsychosis; that the Indians believe in a future state of rewards and punishments; that the first history of which they can boast has, for its subject, the destruction of the human race, for their multiplied enormities, in in in a certain great deluge, from which only eight persons were saved in an ark fabricated by the immediate command of Veeshnu; that, in their principal Deity, a plain Trinity of divine persons is discovered, since that Deity is symbolically designated by an image with three heads affixed to one body, and that the second person that Trinity is, in their mythology, invested with the office of a preserver and mediator, and in both those characters incarnate; finally, to omit other interesting particulars, that the duration of the CALI YUG, or age immediately succeeding the great deluge, according to their own calculation, does not, but by a few centuries, exceed the period asserted by Christian chronologers to have elapsed since the deluge of Noah; and that the existing world is to be consumed by a general conflagration: when all these circumstances, to be accounted for by no immediate connection or intercourse whatever with the Hebrew nation, in any period of their empire, are calmly considered by an impartial and unprejudiced mind, the result, I am persuaded, must be an increased confidence |