In her book, THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION, Karen Armstrong describes the early beginnings of our religious traditions.  As Rig Veda Hymn 121 was mentioned in a recent discussion posted by Claudia M. Mazzuco, I thought I would post something I read earlier today.

I think it important to be aware that ideas change and spiritual are no different.  Could it be that concepts that form our current religious traditions will change in the next 500 to 1000 years as they did in the last.  In light of the era of rapid technological transformations that we are beginning to enter into, indeed, we could be in the midst of another Great Transformation that, who knows, could be over in the next 20 to 30 years.  Here's what Armstrong wrote:

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"A ritual often ended with the brahmodya competition to find a verbal formula that expressed the mystery of the brahman. The challenger asked a difficult and enigmatic question, and his opponent answered in an equally elusive manner. The match continued until one of the contestants was unable to respond: reduced to silence, he was forced to withdraw.The transcendence of the brahman was sensed in the mysterious clash of unanswerable questions that led to a stunning realization of the impotence of speech. For a few sacred moments, the competitors felt one with the mysterious force that held the whole of life together, and the winner could say that he was the brahman.

By the tenth century (BC) some rishis started to create a new theological discourse. The traditional devas were beginning to seem crude and unsatisfactory; they must point to something beyond themselves. Some of the late hymns of the Rig Veda sought a god who was more worthy of worship. "What god shall we adore with our offering?" asked one of the rishis in Hymn 121 of the tenth book of the Rig Veda. Who was the true lord of men and cattle? Who owned the snowcapped mountains and the mighty ocean? Which of the gods was capable of supporting the heavens? In this hymn, the poet found an answer that would become one of the seminal myths of the Indian Axial Age. He had a vision of a creator god emerging from primal chaos, a personalized version of the brahman. His name was Prajapati: "the All." Pra-japati was identical with the universe; he was the life force that sustained it, the seed of consciousness, and the light that emerged from the waters of unconscious matter. But Prajapati was also a spirit outside the universe, who could order the laws of nature. Immanent and transcendent, he alone was "God of gods and none beside him."

But this seemed far too explicit to another rishi. In the beginning, he maintained, there was nothing. There was neither existence nor nonexistence, neither death nor immortality, but only "indiscriminate chaos." How could this confusion become ordered and viable? The poet decided that there could be no answer to this question:

Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it

was born and whence comes this creation?

The Gods are later than this world's production. Who

knows then whence it first came into being?

He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it

all or did not form it,

Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he

verily knows it—or perhaps he knows not.6*

The poem was a brahmodya. The rishi asked one unfathomable question after another, until both he and his audience were reduced to the silence of unknowing.

Finally, in the famous Purusha Hymn, a rishi meditated on the ancient creation story of the Aryans, and laid the foundation for India's Axial Age. He recalled that the sacrifice of the first man had brought the human race into being. Now he described this primordial Person (Purusha), walking of his own free will into the sacrificial ground, lying down on the freshly strewn grass, and allowing the gods to kill him. This act of self-surrender had set the cosmos in motion. The Purusha was himself the universe. Everything was generated from his corpse: birds, animals, horses, cattle, the classes of human society, heaven and earth, sun and moon. Even the great devas Agni and Indra had emerged from his body. But like Prajapati, he was also transcendent: 75 percent of his being was immortal and could not be affected by time and mortality. Unlike the agonistic rituals of the warriors, there was no fighting in this sacrifice. Purusha gave himself away without a struggle."