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of the control of the popular religiosity, which results in the people's attachment to foreign cults and foreign beliefs.
JAIN JOURNAL
This feature of the Aryan religion is mostly different from the Semitic type, where the real religiosity manifesting itself by devotion and mystical inspiration overgrows all human understanding and leads the believers to the slowly but constant withdrawing from the reality of the world, and turning them towards an unreal and imaginary world of superhuman beings in heaven and hell.
It is not impossible that the Aryan religions have been influenced by this Semitic religious ideas already during the time, when the Aryans have been settled in Iran near to the primeval abodes of the Semitic race, whose influence we can undoubtedly recognise in the old Iranian, i.e., (Persian, Prae-Zarathustrian) religion.
But still greater temptations were set like a trap for the old Aryan religion after the arrival of the Aryans in India. It is certain, that in India several races were settled before the arrival of the Aryans, whose vestiges we recognise in some of the Indian hillmen, e.g., Bhils, Santhals, Todas, etc.
We do not know anything about the religion of these pre-Aryan races in India, but we can reconstruct several features of those religions by studying the popular Indian religions of to-day and the sacred literature of the former times, with the help, however, of comparative ethnography and with the help of the monuments and antiquities which remains from that old period. The result of these studies is, that we must assume at least two types of pre-Aryan religions in India. We do not know whether they have been both animistic or one animistic and the other fetishistic, but we know fairly well, how they manifested themselves. The one type which has been perhaps a fetishistic one by nature menifested itself by exuberant devotion, accompanied by mystical excitement, becoming sometimes a real ecstasy.8 The other one, surely of an animistic character, was accompanied by strong inclination to asceticism. Under the influence of these two elements the original Aryan religion developed in several sects or rather different religious
Of this kind are most of the demonistic rites and ceremonies, which we can find all over India. The most typical, however, are the demon cults in the Tinnevelly district the sorcery of Paraiyans on the Malabar coast, and the 'devil-dancing' in Ceylon (Cf. Dr. O. Pertold, Der singhallesiscke Pilli-Zauber in Archiv fur Religionswissen schaft, vol. XVI, Leipzig, 1913.)
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