About the book
The gods in this book lose. Indra opens it as king of heaven holding the thunderbolt, and Indian religion spends the next two thousand years demoting him; Varuna, the most morally serious god in the Vedic pantheon, all but disappears; and the two figures who get walk-on parts here — Vishnu, and Rudra who becomes Shiva — inherit everything. This is the pantheon in its first form, not its final one.
Donald Mackenzie was a Scottish journalist rather than an orientalist, and this edition says so plainly: he worked from translations and from Macdonell, Oldenberg and Monier Williams, and what he supplied was arrangement and pace. Judged as that, it is very good. Five chapters are printed complete and unaltered — Indra; the great Vedic deities; Yama, the first man and king of the dead; the demons, giants and fairies; and the mysteries of creation, including the hymn that ends by allowing that possibly nobody knows how the world began.
Around the text, and original to this edition: an introduction; an introduction to each chapter; a register grading Mackenzie's relentless comparisons — Indo-Iranian, wider Indo-European, Babylonian, decorative — by how much weight each still bears; a who's-who of 32 figures whose chapter references were produced by searching the text, which is how it was discovered that the book contains two different Savitris; a note on the Sanskrit names; a chronology; and an index of 34 subjects generated from the text.
None of the 1913 illustrations is reproduced. Two of those in these chapters are paintings by Nandalal Bose, who died in 1966 and whose work is in copyright until 2037; the rest name no creator. 94 pages, 6 × 9 in.
