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INTEEPEETATIOK OF THE ASA DOCTRINE. 107
mental idea pervading all the known religious
systems belonging to the people of the Iranic
race, which points towards a common origin
for them. The Asa doctrine of the origin of the
gods and the world, of the strife between Good and
Evil, of the destruction and regeneration of the
world and the gods, if we do not too closely follow
the figures by which it is expressed, has an unmistakable
similarity to the ancient Indian and Median
myths concerning the same subject,—a similarity
which we cannot well explain satisfactorily except
by their origin in a common source. We may
therefore assume that the Germanic race, when it
separated from kindred races as an independent
whole, had already conceived—although indistinctly—those
ideas which it afterward expressed and
farther developed in accordance with its peculiar
character, and connected with a mythology built
upon its own notions of the world, which gradually
obscured the monotheistic ideaS'—at least with the
mass—and set them in the background for poly-
theism. The Asa doctrine, in its peculiarity, seems
thus to have sprung up with the Germanic race
from certain fundamental religious ideas common to
the whole Iranic family.
Concerning the second theory it may be said that
the historical interpretation of the Asa doctrine is
very ancient. The assumption of a historical Odia
and historical ^Esir, of an earthly Asgard on the
plains of the Tanai's, &c., had doubtless its first
basis in the efforts of the Northmen and the Icelanders
to impart to the Asa doctrine— ^which was