Lloyd Tuckey's standard work on "Hypnotism and
Suggestion," and some half dozen others whose titles I have forgotten.
And as I looked at them, I began to understand one reason for
Godfrey's success as a solver of mysteries--no detail of a subject
ever escaped him.
I lit my pipe, sat down, and was soon deep in the lore of the East. I
must confess that I did not make much of it. In that maze of
superstition, the most I could do was to pick up a thread here and
there. The yogi had referred to the White Night of Siva, and I soon
found out that Siva is one of the gods of Hinduism--one of a great
trilogy: Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Siva the
destroyer. He had also spoken of the attributes of Kali, and, after a
little further search, I discovered that Kali was Siva's wife--a most
unprepossessing and fiendish female.
But when I passed on to Hinduism itself, and tried to understand its
tenets and its sects, I soon found myself out of my depth. They were
so jumbled, so multitudinous, and so diverse that I could get no clear
idea of them. I read of the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Brahmanas; of
metaphysical abstractions too tenuous to grasp; of karna or action,
of maya or illusion, and I know not what "tangled jumble of ghosts and
demons, demi-gods, and deified saints, household gods, village gods,
tribal gods, universal gods, with their countless shrines and temples
and din of discordant rites.
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