RELIGIONS OF ANCIENT INDIA 469 



Iran. A part of them remained there, the ancestors of the Iranians 

 that later assembled about Zoroaster, Cyrus, and Darius. Others 

 crossed the mountains and wrested northern India from the dark- 

 skinned aborigines. 



These facts are well known. We have to gather from them, 

 however, for the questions with which we are concerned, first and 

 foremost the fact that the religious beliefs brought by these wan- 

 derers into India must have left such a prehistoric impress as to 

 direct the Indologist's attention beyond India, and as to induce 

 the investigator of non-Indian religions to include Indian conditions 

 in his researches. 



The comparative philologist, aided by eminent Sanskrit scholars, 

 has undertaken the task of reconstructing the long since lost lan- 

 guage of the parent-stock of the Indians, Iranians, Greeks, Italians, 

 Celts, Germans, Slavs in a word, of the Indo-Europeans. Do the 

 religion and mythology of India and the corresponding European 

 forms lend themselves to similar comparisons? Taking India for 

 instance as a starting-point, can we learn the nature of the religion of 

 the Indo-European period, and, if we again go back from the stand- 

 point thus gained, can we discover the origin of the old Indian and 

 European religions? It is undoubtedly justifiable in principle to ask 

 such questions. Yet when we speak of such investigations, it usually 

 means nothing more than looking back upon illusions that are and 

 had to be things of the past. This is, at least, my own firm conviction, 

 and it is also shared by many others. 



The time is past when the Vedic scholar was also the compar- 

 ative mythologist. Religious ideas are naturally subjected to many 

 more indeterminable transformations than languages. The pro- 

 cess of change from the Vedic gods to Apollo or Mars cannot be so 

 clearly pictured as the changes, say, from the Indian to the Greek 

 and Latin sibilants or optative forms. Even that objective cer- 

 tainty based upon ancient monuments that is shared by many other 

 branches of comparative research dealing with antiquity is want- 

 ing. Moreover, the unfavorable aspect of the whole problem 

 is bound up with the question as to the position of the Indo-Euro- 

 pean mother country. At one time this was thought to be in Central 

 Asia: the Indians did not seem to be very far distant; they could 

 in many respects be regarded almost as the representatives of the 

 Indo-Europeans themselves. But we have come to see that that 

 earliest home was very probably situated in Europe. What distances 

 between that home and Vedic India, what contact of the wanderers 

 with strange peoples of different origin, what unavoidable, and 

 for us, incalculable race-mixture, what changes in economic and 

 social conditions! Middle and North-European, Germanic and Lithu- 

 anian data would, we must now assume, teach us more and surer 



