As far back as one can scrutinize the Aryan past he finds, as the earliest known objects of reverence, 'sun' and 'sky,' besides and beside the blessed Manes.

A word here regarding the priority of monotheism or of polytheism.

The tradition is in favor of the latter, while on _a priori_ grounds whoever thinks that the more primitive the race the more apt it is for monotheism will postulate, with some of the older scholars, an assumed monotheism as the pre-historic religion of the Hindus; while whosoever opines that man has gradually risen from a less intellectual stage will see in the early gods of the Hindus only another illustration of one universal fact, and posit even Aryan polytheism as an advance on the religion which it is probable that the remoter ancestors of the Aryans once acknowledged.
A word perhaps should be said, also, in order to a better understanding between the ethnologists as represented by Andrew Lang, and the unfortunate philologists whom it delights him to pommel.
Lang's clever attacks on the myth-makers, whom he persistently describes as the philologists--and they do indeed form part of that camp--have had the effect of bringing 'philological theories' into sad disrepute with sciolists and 'common-sense' people.

But the sun-myths and dawn-myths that the myth-makers discover in Cinderella and Red Riding Hood, ought not to be fathered upon all philologists.

On the other hand, who will deny that in India certain mythological figures are eoian or solar in origin?
Can any one question that Vivasvant the 'wide gleaming' is sun or bright sky, as he is represented in the Avesta and Rig Veda?
Yet is a very anthropomorphic, nay, earthly figure, made out of this god.