BABYLON AND PERSIA

ARYAN MYTHS. 51the purest and most fervent piety.It is, therefore,safest for the layman not to meddle with these mat¬ters at all, but leave them in the hands of the pri-ssts,who are qualified by right divine to wield the spiritualpower, and will, if meetly remunerated, perform forthe layman the necessary ceremonies, instruct himas to his own sharein them, and see that he doesnot come to, harm, through ignorance or overofficiousness.19. It will be seen that so material a conceptionand use of prayer and sacrifice are more like con¬juring, i;i spirit andobject, than any thing else..They may be considered as a remnant, slightly trans¬formed, of that grossest and most primitive stage ofreligious consciousness which every race must startfrom, and which we saw amply illustrated in themost ancient practices and conjuring-feats of theShumiro-Accad sorcerer-priests. The old Aryas andIndo-Eranians had by no means shaken themselvesfree of this primitive materialism. The gods whomthey worship often bewilder us by their mixed nature,made up of material and spiritual attributes in sucha way as to make it very difficult to know where to 'draw the line. While at one time Varuna, Mitra,Agni, Soma, are beyond a doubt praised and invokedas the visible, material sky, light, fire, the plantthat is brought from the mountains, cut up andpressed, and as the fermented intoxicating beverage ;at others they are addressed as the most spiritualbeings and invested with the loftiest abstract proper¬ties: Varuna becomes the Lord that dwells in orabove the sky, whose robe the sky is, the lifter of