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JULY, 1903.)
THE RELIGION OF THE IRANIAN PEOPLES.
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to the Iranian he is of the realm of the evil. What most claims our attention is that there is so much that is the same in the two creeds, but which in spirit and nature is wholly antagonistic, standing poles apart. In respect of one point we are doubtful, namely, touching the Haoms-Soma worship. The service of Soma in the Indian cult is a cardinal circumstance, but is 10 only in the later stage of Zarathushtrianism. It is nowhere alluded to in the Gathaic literature. The evident inference, consequently, is that a feature which takes a principal rank in the oldest document of a people, and which rises to importance at a subsequent period in another, is a loan from the former to the latter. Additional force is lent to the deduction when we remember that Haoma does not play anything like so prominent a part among the Iranians, which it enjoys among the Indians; that the Indians have dedicated one entire mandala of the Rig Veda to it in its form of Pavamana; that its votaries, Indra foremost, indulge in boundless potations of the beverage, winding ap with larceny and mortal fracas; and that they have an inexhaustible dictionary of its honorific epithets and a vast number of compounds, one of whose components is represented by Soma. The Iranians, on the contrary, are poor in this respect, less lavish, sparing even to parsimony in conferring titles on Haome. To the Soma-imbibing Indians we find no parallel in the Avesta. It at the same time merits attention that in the solitary passage in all the Gathaic texts where Haoma is mentioned, in the later addendum to the Yasna Haptanghaiti 01 we simultaneously come upon the Atharvans or Fire-priests "who come from afar." All this tends to make one suspicious as to the Soma-Haoma doctrine and as to the cult of it being the relic of the East Aryan epoch. It is indubitable that the East Aryans were acquainted with an immortalizing drink, for we find it among the Iranians, and it is equally traceable to the old Aryan or Indo-Germanic age. The myths and customs under consideration are at once ancient and universal. Their vestiges can be traced even to the nonAryang. I am speaking only of the peculiar shape with which they are invested in the SomaHaoma latria, and this form I am inclined to get down as comparatively later. Again, I am not of opinion that the Iranians adopted the Haomo direct from the Vedic Indians, and that "the Atharvans who came from afar" proceeded from the opposite bank of the Indas. It were then not so fundamentally divergent in its agreement with Soma, nor would it have been evolved so independently in Iran. And in that case it were not easy to differentiate it from Indra and Twahstra. In all probability the parent-land of the Haoma-Soma worship has to be sought on the Iranian river Harakhvaiti, whence it would disseminate itself east, north, and westward. In the name Sarasvati, then, which was bestowed by the Vedic Indians on the invisible stream between the Indus and the Ganges and on the banks of which they originally settled, we would have to look for & reminiscence of the holy river in whose vicinity the peculiar cult arose.62
We now pass on to give a conspectus of the religion of the East Iranians, of the yet inseparate Indians and Iranians.
If they had still clung to a goodly number of animistic ideas and usages, nevertheless their religion was dicidedly polytheistic. The beings they invoked they addressed by a variety of honorific epithets: - The celestials (dera - daeva), the spirits (Asura - Ahura), the affluent donors or lot-dispensers (bhaga, -bagha, baga), the revered (yajata - yazuta). Of these appellations the first two are of the most frequent occurrence in both the creeds; the last two are perhaps more in vogue in one clan than the other. Two of these, deva and bhaga, were current even prior to the East Iranian period, the first being very general, the second at least among the Slav people. Agura has its counterpart in the old Norse Asen, while Yajata is a congener of the Greek ayos.
61 Fama, 42, 5.
6 This coincides with Hillebrandt's conjectarer, Vedesche Mythologie, I. 100. But all his hypotheses oannot be acoepted.
