The evidence available for the beginnings of the other Brahmanical creeds is certainly not of the same nature and importance as has been collected and discussed above. The five well-known Brahmanical sects (Panchopasakas) were the Vaish- nava, Saiva, Sakta, Saura and Ganapatya.
They centred respectively on the worship of Vishnu (Vasudeva-Vishnu-Narayana), Siva (Rudra- Siva), Sakti (the female principle, conveniently called Durga-Parvati), Surya (the sun god) and Ganapati (the elephant-headed and pot-bellied divinity), ‘the lord of obstacles’ there was also another band of devotees in ancient India whose special object of veneration was the war-god Sub- rahmanya or Karttikeya, but who were curiously enough not included in the orthodox list of the five sects.
It is probable that the exclusive worship of this god, confined perhaps only to a few warlike Indian tribes, had been largely discontinued by the time the list of the five Brahmanical sects was compiled, being gradually merged with the cults of Sakti and Siva.
There is also reason to believe that most of these sects, barring the two discussed above, were comparatively late in their evolution and systematisation, though the worship of their cult-pictures in a general way had been current among Indians for a long time.
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Saktism was one such cult. The worship of the mother-goddess must have been in vogue in India from a very early date. The Indus Valley remains in the shape of ring-stones and terracotta figurines probably symbolising the female principle seem to indicate that it enjoyed some prominence among the early Indian settlers.
But the evidence of the Vedas confronts us with the fact that sacrifices were performed mostly in honour of different gods, the names of comparatively few goddesses being mentioned in the hymns. The female deities are sometimes collectively named as the ‘wives of the gods’ (e.g., in the passage devanam patnin yajati), but the two goddesses that stand out prominent in the hymns of the Rigveda are Ushas, the goddess of dawn, and Vak, the goddess of speech.
But still we do not find in the early stratum of the Vedic literature the names of such goddesses as Durga, Kali, Ambika, Uma and others who singly as well as collectively became afterwards the central deities of the Sakta cult.
It is only in the Later Vedic literature that we find stray mention of these deities and that too only in contexts which do not prove that they were of any great importance to the higher sections of the Indians. It is in the Gupta and post-Gupta inscriptions that we find a clear mention of the cult and allusions to its sectaries