A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries

by Mircea Eliade

In the most famous hymn of the Rig Veda (10. 129) the cosmogony is presented as a metaphysics. The poet asks himself how Being could have come out of non-Being, since, in the beginning, neither “non-Being existed, nor Being” (strophe 1. 1). “In that time there existed neither death nor nondeath” (that is, neither men nor gods). There was only the undifferentiated principle called “One” (neuter). “The One breathed from its own impulse, without there being any breath.” Aside from that, “nothing else existed” (str. 2). “In the beginning, darkness was hidden by darkness,” but heat (generated by asceticism, tapas) gave birth to the “One,” “potential” (ābhū)—i.e., “embryo”—“covered with emptiness” (we may understand: surrounded by the primitive waters). From this germ (“potential”) develops Desire (kāma), and it is this same Desire that “was the first seed (retas) of Consciousness (manas),” an astonishing assertion, which anticipates one of the chief theses of Indian philosophical thought.