in Hayti.[16] An exact parallel to the vague idea of hell at the close of the Vedic period, with the gradual increase of the idea, alternating with a theory of reincarnation, may be found in the fact that, in general, there is no notion of punishment after death among the Indians of the New World; but that, while the good are assisted and cared for after death by the ‘Master of Breath,’ the Creeks believe that the liar, the coward, and the niggard (Vedic sinners par excellence!) are left to shift for themselves in darkness; whereas the Aztecs believed in a hell surrounded by the water called ’Nine Rivers,’ guarded by a dog and a dragon; and the great Eastern American tribes believe that after the soul has been for a while in heaven it can, if it chooses, return to earth and be born again as a man, utilizing its old bones (which are, therefore, carefully preserved by the surviving members of the family) as a basis for a new body.[17]

To turn to another foreign religion, how tempting would it be to see in Nutar the ‘abstract power’ of the Egyptian, an analogue of brahma and the other ‘power’ abstractions of India; to recognize Brahm[=a] in El; and in Nu, sky, and expanse of waters, to see Varuna; especially when one compares the boat-journey of the Vedic seer with R[=a]’s boat in Egypt.  Or, again, in the twin children of R[=a] to see the Acvins; and to associate the mundane egg of the Egyptians with that of the Brahmans.[18] Certainly, had the Egyptians been one of the Aryan families, all these conceptions had been referred long ago to the category of ‘primitive Aryan ideas.’  But how primitive is a certain religious idea will not be shown by simple comparison of Aryan parallels.  It will appear more often that it is not ‘primitive,’ but, so to speak, per-primitive, aboriginal with no one race, but with the race of man.  When we come to describe the religions of the wild tribes of India it will be seen that among them also are found traits common, on the one hand, to the Hindu, and on the other to the wild tribes of America.  With this warning in mind one may inquire at last in how far a conservative judgment can find among the Aryans themselves an identity of original conception in the different forms of divinities and religious rites.  Foremost stand the universal chrematheism, worship of inanimate objects regarded as usefully divine, and the cult of the departed dead.  This latter is almost universal, perhaps pan-Aryan, and Weber is probably right in assuming that the primitive Aryans believed in a future life.  But Benfey’s identification of Tartaras with the Sanskrit Tal[=a]tala, the name of a special hell in very late systems of cosmogony, is decidedly without the bearing he would put upon it.  The Sanskrit word may be taken directly from the Greek, but of an Aryan source for both there is not the remotest historical probability.

When, however, one comes to the Lord of the Dead he finds himself already in a narrower circle.  Yama is the Persian Yima, and the name of Kerberos may have been once an adjective applied to the dog that guarded the path to paradise; but other particular conceptions that gather about each god point only to a period of Indo-Iranian unity.