Hindu Mythology.
Authored by W.J Wilkins.
This book is an old, old book. In fact it is so old, if you ever chanced to flip through the first published copy, the pages yellow with natural age, would stick to your fingers as crumbling flakes of tattered alphabets and faded letters, robbing you of the chance to dive deep into the world of Hindu Mythology.
The author, William Joseph Wilkins was a man consumed by curiosity for the subject and during the compilation of this book poured over manuscripts, researching and translating word for word of sacred text without filling in spaces with judgmental expressions.
The Hindu scriptures, four in all, and known as the Vedas are possibly like the religion itself the oldest in the world. Rote to memory and orally transmitted from one generation to the next even after writing was invented, (for it was considered too sacred to be put on paper) they are the fountain from which flows the stories and personifications of present Hindu deities and heroes, worshiped by millions in the country today.
The Hindu Mythology by W.J Wilkins is considered to be a faithful English rendition of what was once available only in the ancient language of the Aryans: Sanskrit. But the book is much more than just a mere translation. As readers will go through its pages, they will also discover how along with the gods, their names and stories, the Vedas themselves were transformed by the imaginative hand of writers as it passed through the ages, and how the all powerful Shiva lost his supremacy to the omnipresent Vishnu.
It is interesting that Vishnu or Shiva are not discussed in the Rig Veda the most important and most ancient of the 5 Vedas. Rig Veda mostly talks about ancient Gods that are similiar to the Nordic and the Greek Gods. Vishnu and his avatars are introduced in other scriptures during a much later period. The article says ‘the all powerful Shiva lost his supremacy to the omnipresent Vishnu’, well, I think Shiva was an Indus Valley civilization God as seen from the seals at Mohinjodaro and Harrapa who got demoted in status by Vishnu who was the God of the migrants from central Asia.