Hinduism
The word Hindu comes from the river Indus, and it just means the people who live near the Indus river (actually in modern Pakistan).
The Harappa people
who lived near that river about 2500 BC carved
images of several different gods on their clay
seals. We can't read Harappan
writing, so we don’t know
what the Harappan people called their gods. But some of these gods look
a lot like the later Hindu gods Shiva and Vishnu,
so this may be the earliest part of Hinduism.
About 1500 BC, when the Aryans invaded India, they brought with them
their Indo-European sky gods.
As the two cultures mixed, it seems that their gods mixed too. So Hinduism
got some new gods, and also some new ideas.
The first written evidence of Hinduism that we can read is the Rig
Veda, a long poem in Sanskrit
probably composed about 1000 BC. People sang or recited the Rig Veda
for hundreds of years before it was written down around 300 BC. The
Rig Veda is a bunch of hymns (HIMS) (songs for the gods), magic spells,
and instructions for what to say when you are sacrificing
animals.
The Rig Veda mentions many different gods (polytheism).
Most of the gods are male, and many of them are sky gods or weather
gods like a god of rain, Indra, or like Varuna, the god of the sea. People sacrificed animals to their gods. The Rig Veda also tells us that people sometimes got in touch
with the gods by drinking a drug called soma that made them hear the
gods talking to them. (We don’t know now what soma was made of). Both Soma and the fire of sacrifice (Agni) were thought of as gods themselves, too.
About 600 BC, the idea of reincarnation became more
and more common among Hindus. Most people began to think that after
you died you would be reborn into another body. If you had been good,
you would get a good body, like a princess. If you had been bad, you
would come back as a cockroach or a rat.
Gradually people began to hate the idea that you had
to be endlessly reborn in different forms. They wanted to get free of
the wheel of rebirth, and just be left alone. People began to think
that sacrificing animals was a burden on your karma, or fate, that prevented
you from getting free of reincarnation. So animal sacrifice became less
popular.
Around 300 BC, people began to worship new gods, who didn’t need
animal sacrifices. These new gods were Vishnu
and Shiva. Generally people gave Vishnu and
Shiva flowers, incense, prayers, food, or music, but they didn’t
kill animals for them. They began to worship Vishnu and Shiva more, and paid less attention to
their old gods Indra and Varuna and the others.
Much later, between 400 and 650 AD, at the
end of the Gupta period, another
new god came into Hinduism. This new god was a Mother Goddess. Cows
were sacred to this Mother Goddess, and so Hindus gradually stopped
eating beef. Like Vishnu and Shiva,
the Mother Goddess had many incarnations and many names. Parvati, Uma,
and Annapurna were beautiful goddesses, who brought blessings to people.
But other incarnations were called Kali, Chandi, Durga or Chamunda,
and these goddesses were terrible giants with black skin, huge red tongues
that stick out, and fierce tusks. These had many arms and each arm held
a weapon, and they wore necklaces of skulls or human heads.
