or patriarchs have posterity? it was necessary to provide them with wives. In order to account for their existence, the Manu Swáyambhuva and his wife Satarupá were added to the scheme, or Brahmá becomes twofold, male and female, and daughters are then begotten, who are married to the Prajápatis. Upon this basis various legends of Brahma's double nature, some no doubt as old as the Vedas, have been constructed: but although they may have been derived in some degree from the authentic tradition of the origin of mankind from a single pair, yet the circumstances intended to give more interest and precision to the story are evidently of an allegorical or mystical description, and conduced, in apparently later times, to a coarseness of realization which was neither the letter nor spirit of the original legend. Swáyambhuva, the son of the self-born or untreated, and his wife Satarupá, the hundred-formed or multiform, are themselves allegories; and their female descendants, who become the wives of the Rishis, are Faith, Devotion, Content, Intelligence, Tradition, and the like; whilst amongst their posterity we have the different phases of the moon, and the sacrificial fires. In another creation the chief source of creatures is the patriarch Daksha (ability), whose daughters, Virtues or Passions or Astronomical Phenomena, are the mothers of all existing things. These legends, perplexed as they appear to be, seem to admit of allowable solution, in the conjecture that the Prajápatis and Rishis were real personages, the authors of the Hindu system of social, moral, and religious obligations, and the first observers of the heavens, and teachers of astronomical science.

The regal personages of the Swáyambhuva Manwantara are but few, but they are described in the outset as governing the earth in the dawn of society, and as introducing agriculture and civilisation. How much of their story rests upon a traditional remembrance of their actions, it would be useless to conjecture, although there is no extravagance in supposing that the legends relate to a period prior to the full establishment in India of the Brahmanical institutions. The legends of Dhruva and Prahláda, which are intermingled with these particulars, are in all probability ancient, but they are amplified, in a strain conformable to the Vaishńava purport of this Puráńa, by doctrines and prayers asserting the

identity of Vishńu with the supreme. It is clear that the stories do not originate with this Puráńa. In that of Prahláda particularly, as hereafter pointed out, circumstances essential to the completeness of the story are only alluded to, not recounted; shewing indisputably the writer's having availed himself of some prior authority for his narration.

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Hinduism

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