between gods and initiated mortals.  Hence their great sacredness and the silence maintained throughout the Vedic and the Brahmanical periods about any object concerned with, or referring to, reading and writing.  It was the language of the gods.  If our Western critics can only understand what the Ancient Hindu writers meant by Rhutaliai, so often mentioned in their mystical writings, they will be in a position to ascertain the source from which the Hindus first derived their knowledge of writing.

A secret language, common to all schools of occult science once prevailed throughout the world.  Hence Orpheus learnt “letters” in the course of his initiation.  He is identified with Indra; according to Herodotus he brought the art of writing from India; his complexion swarthier than that of the Thracians points to his Indo-Aryan nationality—­supposing him to have been “a bard and priest,” and not a god; the Pelasgians are said to have been born in Thracia; they are believed (in the West) to have first possessed the art of writing, and taught the Phoenicians; from the latter all modern alphabets proceed.  I submit, then, with all these coincidences and sequences, whether the balance of proof is on the side of the theory that the Aryans transmitted the art of writing to the people of the West; or on the side which maintains that they, with their caste of scholarly Brahmans, their noble sacerdotal tongue, dating from high antiquity, their redundant and splendid literature, their acquaintance with the most wonderful and recondite potentialities of the human spirit, were illiterate until the era of Panini, the grammarian and last of the Rishis.  When the famous theorists of the Western colleges can show us a river running from its mouth back to its source in the feeble mountain spring, then may we be asked to believe in their theory of Aryan illiteracy.  The history of human intellectual development shows that humanity always passes through the stage of ideography or pictography before attaining that of cursive writing.  It therefore remains with the Western critics who oppose the antiquity of Aryan Scriptures to show us the pictographic proofs which support their position.  As these are notoriously absent, it appears they would have us believe that our ancestors passed immediately from illiteracy to the Devanagari characters of Panini’s time.

Let the Orientalists bear in mind the conclusions drawn from a careful study of the Mahabharata by Muir in his “Sanskrit Texts” (vol.  I. pp. 390,480 and 482).  It may be conclusively proven on the authority of the Mahabharata that the Yavanas (of whom India, as alleged, knew nothing before the days of Alexander!) belong to those tribes of Kshatriyas who, in consequence of their non-communication with, and in some cases rejection by, the Brahmins, had become from twice-born, “Vrishalas,”—­ i.e., outcasts (Mahabharata Anusasanaparvam, vv. 2103 F.):  “Sakah Yavana-Kambojas tastah