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problems, by letting the light of present day illumine the world of 

 books and traditions. We are not the first in this field of research. 

 I call to mind the much lamented names of two masters. Erwin 

 Rohde studied Greek religious beliefs, Robertson Smith the religious 

 cult of the Semites. Our science has also begun this bold though 

 possible task, and we may even now say that results have been 

 attained; and also, of course, an outlook upon new problems that 

 formerly were not raised, could not be raised. For, if anywhere, the 

 words, 



To riddle after riddle we the answers read, , 



find the inevitable reply, 



To riddles new each time the answers lead. 



The elements of the religion of ancient India that have been brought 

 into the right perspective with the aid of ethnology, usually differ, as 

 one might expect, from those with which the comparative studies 

 of Indo-Germanic scholars dealt. There is little here about gods and 

 heroes, of rich poetic myths. We are dealing with the low, the crude, 

 and the uncouth; with kobolds and demons, with the worship of the 

 dead, with fetishism and magic, with the grotesque, which, when 

 we learn to understand it, ceases to be grotesque. As we find such 

 universal human forms again in the Veda, some of the barriers that 

 seemed to isolate this from the outer world fall down. The stu- 

 dent of the Veda, having taken up the relations I have attempted 

 to describe, learns how a prehistoric form fuses with higher religious 

 forms, envelops itself in them, transforms itself into them and 

 broadens itself out into them. He learns to see in the priest, the 

 medicine-man, in many a sacrifice, in some old incantation for rain, 

 in the pious symbolism of burial customs, the pale terror of the savage 

 at the treacherous, avaricious soul of the dead. He resolves con- 

 ceptions and customs occurring side by side in the texts into a 

 sequence of the old and the new, the beginnings of which lie per- 

 haps thousands of years apart. It is as if we were walking through 

 a city and gradually discovered, behind the at first apparently uni- 

 form exterior, the mighty remains of a distant past, the late addi- 

 tions merely adhering to the old. If in order to shed light upon 

 these relations, our investigations can by chance make use of mate- 

 rials that lie infinitely removed in space and time from our own field 

 of research, who would blame us for rejoicing at the bold indirect- 

 ness of such an attempt? The Indologist can here no longer claim 

 for himself, as formerly, in comparative mythology the leading part. 

 It is not for him to teach the ethnologist, but to learn from him, 

 concerning the appearance and significance of the lower mytholog- 

 ical and religious forms. Undoubtedly he contributes his share to 



