On the philosophical side a modern manual of Hindu practice endeavours to combine religion and metaphysics. Ere the believer rises from bed in the morning he should confess his unworthiness: "O Lord of the universe, O All-Consciousness, presiding Deity of all, Vishnu, at thy bidding, and to please thee alone, I rise this morning, and enter on the discharge of my daily duties. I know what is righteous, yet I feel no attraction for it; I know what is not righteous, yet I have no repulsion from it. O Lord of the senses, O Thou seated in the heart, may I do thy commands as ordered by thee in my conscience." But in order to remind him of his divine origin, in this age of sordid interests and low ideals, he is enjoined also to look upon himself as the reflected image of God, the Eternal, the All-Knowing, the All-Glad, and to recite the ancient verse, "I am divine and not anything else, I am indeed Brahma above all sorrows, my form is Being, Intelligence, and Bliss, and eternally free is my nature."
The duties of offering and prayer may be performed from day to day, or they may be reserved for special occasions of enterprise, danger, and thanksgiving. They mark the incidents of the week, the month, the year; there are sabbaths, new moons, seed-time and harvest, and new year festivals. This periodicity affects the whole community together. But there are also personal events, marking { 159} successive stages in each individual career, which must be placed under the shelter of religion, and do not all occur at the same time. From his entry into the world to his departure from it each person passes at certain crises out of one condition into another, and the transition requires the protection of the powers above. Birth, the attainment of adolescence, marriage, death, are the chief occasions marked by what M. van Gennep has called "rites of passage." They are all connected with mysteries of life.
For life, in the lower culture, is exposed perpetually to dangers of all kinds. Demonic influences continually threaten it; strange pollutions beset it; the blood in which it is often located has about it something weird, uncanny, sometimes unclean. So there are preliminary rites for bringing in the soul of the child as yet unborn from its home in the ground, among the flowers and trees, or in wells and lakes and running streams. Among tribes which regard the mother as unclean before birth, the uncleanness is transmitted to the child, and ceremonies of purification must be performed for both. The child must be guarded against the evil eye, perils of infection of various kinds, or the attacks of hostile demons. The ritual of cleansing must be scrupulously performed. When Apollo and the future Buddha were born, divine beings received them; Apollo was washed in fair water, and wondrous { 160} streams, warm and cold, descended from the sky for the Indian babe. Sometimes there is such haste to place the infant under divine care that it is borne away at once to the temple, as Turner noticed among the Nanumangans of Hudson's island, that its first breathings, when only a few seconds old, may take place in the presence of the god, and his blessing be invoked on the essentials of its life.