(This crazy e-mail program won't let me make comments within the quoted
text, so my response is here on top...)
It's very possible what your suggesting. But there would have to be
Dravidian and Munda influence on Hinduism somewhere. And I think Hinduism
has evolved quite a bit from the "proto-Aryan" religion. I'd have to check
into the origins of Zoroastrianism, which seems to share features with Judaism
(monotheism) and Taoism (dualistic principle) and maybe Confucianism (forgot
which came first).
Hinduism has no single unifying dogma or creed, and it does resemble "folk
religion", shamanism, etc. Buddhism is pretty diverse as well, divided
into a large number of schools; the two major groups being Theravada and
Mahayana.
Incidentally, I've been investigating the origins of the monotheistic
religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and found they may have common
origins in Egypt, perhaps with Akhenaton, the Pharaoh and religious reformer who
introduced worship of a single god, the sun-disc god Aton. (His succestor
Tutankhamun promoted a syncretic version, where the gods are mediators, like
saints and angels in Christianity, between man and the one God.)
Your Celtic god of hell, the equivalent of "the eater of the dead", may be
Samhain (according to the Irish name), but that I'm not too sure about.
~DaW~
I've posted before that I think Hinduism can claim to be the true
descendant of the PIE religion. Only the Parsees of India
(Zoroastrianism) can make a similar claim. Everywhere else, it's a
borrowed religion (Christianity mainly, but also Islam).
From what I understand, one can describe Hinduism as a
'bottom-up'
relgion, where whatever the folk believe is more or less
'orthodoxy',
vs what you get with Christianity and Islam (and even
Buddhism), and
what we in the West see as mutual contradictions are just
part of the
system.
What prompts this post is an article in the
Telegraph about the royal
mess in Nepal, linked here. Also check out the
Nepalese links:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=001831922500268&rtmo=lzFPwoHt&atmo
=ttttttyd&pg=/et/01/6/12/wnep12.html
Isn't
there something in Celtic mythology about 'eaters of the dead',
the office
of the 'sin-eater'? I remember seeing a PBS play on this
many years
ago.