While the Cow was at the height of her glory and the Religion of the Aryans was developing apace along the ‘sattvic’ path of Purity and Light towards its ultimate goal-Spirituality, both the progress of Religion as well as the position of the Cow met with a great setback. 

Dark adverse forces of ‘Antariksha’ inspiring and acting in close union with certain non-Aryan sects practicing low cults, consisting mostly of gross sensuality and wholesale ‘himsa’ (violence) in the form of animal sacrifices, broke in upon the serenity of the ‘sattvic’ life of the Aryans with unprecedented force and fury. Disrupting the even tenure of their life and causing violent upheavals in the Society itself, they destroyed that congenial atmosphere so necessary for any kind of genuine religious progress. This undesirable impact arrested the even growth of the Aryan Religion for a long time and the interpolations superimposed by these sects based on their own barbaric customs and obnoxious ways of life have not only marred the inner consistency of the Vedas but have also left their awkward marks affecting their future development as well. 

Their aggressive attitude as reflected in their wild, coercive demands to be treated as ‘Atithi’ with fantastic privileges of a guest without any responsibility to the host, in every house they visited, struck terror in the hearts of the Aryans and harassed them beyond words. Religion, instead of being a unifying force became and oppressive power. Instead of enabling men to cross the bar or worldliness onto the open Seas of the Spirit, it came on the other hand to confine men’s lives to the backwash of superstitious customs and superficial minutiae solemnly performed. 

For a while, things looked dark and foreboding as though the cults of these savage sects would extinguish forever, the light kindled by the Aryans. Although this was not to be, they had to wait till the closing of the period of the ‘Brahmanas’ (Brahmins) down to the middle of the ‘Aranyakas’, that the long-eclipsed Religion of the Aryans could free itself from this alien influence as well as from the trammels of elaborately ritualized sacrifices, innocent (like the pristine ones of old) or degenerate, (like the animal immolating of later times) and picking up the rhythm of Spiritual thought, could begin in right earnest the inquiry into the nature of ‘Brahma’, ‘Maya’, ‘Jiva’, ‘Jagat’, ‘Atma’ etc., which reached its culmination in the Upnishads. Yet, even the Upanishads are not, on the one hand, all or in every respect free from this alien influence*, and on the other, from the totally life negating attitude caused by the excesses of these cults.  

In order however to understand how all this happened in the early history of the Aryans in India during this crucial and critical period, that decided to an extent its future density as well, it is necessary to know the barest essentials of the nature of Man, the World of Worlds he inhabits, the kinds of Cults followed by these Sects together with a correct understanding of the nature of God and of Spirituality.

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