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JULY, 1903.)
THE RELIGION OF THE IRANIAN PEOPLES.
299
down to the Atharva Veda and the Brahmanas that this sense is found to preponderate. But even then the Asuras are exhibited to us in the light not of creatures diabolical by nature, not of fiends proper, but as rivals of the depas and obnoxious to their devotoes. The word which, per se, originally conveys the general sense of "spirits or beings" itself occasioned its twofold employment. At all events, the modification in question has been brought about unforced, by degrees, and on Indian soil, and has no connection with any religious reformation in Iran or with the establishment of the latria of Mazda.
On the other hand, the Iranians have more than one god to whom the Indians pray as to devas, to wit, Mitra, Aryaman, Soma. The Iranian comprehends them under the general appellations of Yazats and Baghe, without belying his Zarathushtrian creed. Only a couple of passages to characterize * few solitary Indian deities as hostile to the Zarathushtrian Yazatas-passages which are very late, and which surely cannot be assigned to the incipient stage of the Mazdayagnian fraternity.
In fine, throughout the Veda there is no trace of a conflict with the dogma of Zoroaster and not the faintest testimony tbat tbe minstrels and the Brahmans were cognisant of the worship of Mazda, which would have been the case to certainty had hostility to the reform movement led the Indians to secede from their union with the cognate sept and to wander far afield in search of a separate habitat of their own.
Accordingly, though we cannot subscribe to the hypothesis that the Vedic and the Zarathush. trian religions spraug when both the tribes were still flourishing together, and that the rise of religious innovations occasioned dissension, perhaps a crusade, still it has an atom of validity in it. No external circumstances in themselves are capable of explaining the radical differences which obtain between the two systems that have issued from one and the same source. The centrifugal or diverging tendencies in both must have been present at least in an embryonic stage in the East Aryan period subsequently to break out with such distinct sharpness. That they culminated in an open rupture is probable. The split was presumably more acutely felt than overtly avowed. It, however, contributed to an estrangemeat between the brother clans, and it strikes me as likely that this was what in fact happened. Nevertheless, the birth of the Vedic as well as the Zarathushtrian religion was posterior by far to their separation. Neither of the systems is the direct outcome of the East Aryan religion. A considerable interval must have elapsed between their genesis and the disjunction of the old Aryan community during which the archaic faith unfolded itself in diverse mutually antithetical currents. The probabilities are that subsequently to the settlement in India the one tendency first attained to consolidation, and that Zarathushtrianisin represented the other tendency long after, and, inasmuch as it answered to the spirit or genius of the Iranian nation, it found its way among them.
But external circumstances likewise co-operated to bring about the result. The fertile India lying under a warm sky, with its luxuriant vegetation and its superabundance of everything, made sustenance, without considerable exertion, possible, conducing in the end to indolence, tranquil meditation, and self-absorption. Surrounded on the two sides by ocean and cut off in the North and North-west froin other peoples by high chains of mountains and a great river, the new in-dwellers of India were deprived of all opportunities to participate in the historical development proceeding in the West. The Indian Aryans began by waging War upon the autochthonous tribes who disputed with the intruders the possession of the land. In many Vedic hymns we perceive the ecbo of their struggles. The martial Soma-drinking Indra, with his stormy Maruts, at whose head was the terrible Rodra, were more than Varuna and his circle, the dominant gods appropriate to the stirring times. Evon Agni, more of a divinity of the priest than the warrior, engaged several times in Indra's battles. But after the termination of the conflict between the new lords and the natives, the might of the latter being broken and the supremacy of the Aryans assured, when the internecine feuds which the Aryans carried on to their immense detriment had subsided, and when there was little
Indra, Saura (corta? i..., siva) and the Naonbaitya (Nastya). - Vendidad, 10, 9; 19, 13.
