The Open court . ofman. We are told in the Yajurveda that the god produced fromhimself the soul, which is accordingly a part of his own being, andclothed it with a body—a process which is reported in the reverseorder in the Hebrew Genesis, where Elohim creates first the bodyand then breathes the life into the body, which makes of man aliving soul. Brahma is pictured with four heads and four hands, in whichhe holds a spoon, a sacrificial basin, a rosary, and the Vedas. Oneof the four hands is frequently represented as empty. He sits on alotus which grows from Vishnus navel, representing the spi
The Open court . ofman. We are told in the Yajurveda that the god produced fromhimself the soul, which is accordingly a part of his own being, andclothed it with a body—a process which is reported in the reverseorder in the Hebrew Genesis, where Elohim creates first the bodyand then breathes the life into the body, which makes of man aliving soul. Brahma is pictured with four heads and four hands, in whichhe holds a spoon, a sacrificial basin, a rosary, and the Vedas. Oneof the four hands is frequently represented as empty. He sits on alotus which grows from Vishnus navel, representing the spirit thatbroods over the waters. Brahma keeps the first place in the speculations of philoso-phers, where he is identified with the life-breath of the world, theAtman or self that appears in mans soul, but he has not exer-cised a great influence on the people. The gods of the people mustbe less abstract, more concrete and more human. Thus it is nat-ural that Vishnu, the second person of the trinity, the deity of. Brahma and Suraswati.(Reproduced from Coleman. 466 THE OPEN COURT. avatars or incarnations, is, for all practical purposes, by far moreimportant than Brahma. Vishnu appears in ten incarnations, which are as follows :^In the first incarnation, called the Matsya-Avatar, Vishnu as-sumes the form of a fish in order to recover the Vedas stolen byevil demons and hidden in the floods of a deluge that covered thewhole earth. This incarnation is of interest because we read inthe Fisiis Sophia (one of the most important gnostic books) thatthe books of leou, which were dictated by God to Enoch in para- ^^
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade188, booksubjectreligion, bookyear1887
