in primitive times.[22] The name of the fire-priest, brahman = fla(g)men(?), is an indication of the primitive fire-cult in antithesis to the soma-cult, which latter belongs to the narrower circle of the Hindus and Persians.  Here, however, in the identity of names for sacrifice (yajna, yacna) and of barhis, the sacrificial straw, of soma = haoma, together with many other liturgical similarities, as in the case of the metres, one must recognize a fully developed soma-cult prior to the separation of the Hindus and Iranians.

Of demigods of evil type the Y[=a]tus are both Hindu and Iranian, but the priest-names of the one religion are evil names in the other, as the devas, gods, of one are the daevas, demons, of the other.[23] There are no other identifications that seem at all certain in the strict province of religion, although in myth the form of Manus, who is the Hindu Noah, has been associated with Teutonic Mannus, and Greek Minos, noted in Thucydides for his sea-faring.  He is to Yama (later regarded as his brother) as is Noah to Adam.

We do not lay stress on lack of equation in proper names, but, as Schrader shows (p. 596 ff.), very few comparisons on this line have a solid phonetic foundation.  Minos, Manu; Ouranos, Varuna; Wotan, V[=a]ta, are dubious; and some equate flamen with blotan, sacrifice.

Other wider or narrower comparisons, such as Neptunus from nap[=a]t ap[=a]m, seem to us too daring to be believed.  Apollo (sapary), Aphrodite (Apsaras), Artamis (non-existent [r.]tam[=a]l), P[=a]n (pavana), have been cleverly compared, but the identity of forms has scarcely been proved.  Nor is it important for the comparative mythologist that Okeanus is ‘lying around’ ([=a]cay[=a]na).  More than that is necessary to connect Ocean mythologically with the demon that surrounds (swallows) the waters of the sky.  The Vedic parallel is rather Ras[=a], the far-off great ‘stream.’  It is rarely that one finds Aryan equivalents in the land of fairies and fays.  Yet are the Hindu clever artizan Ribhus[24] our ‘elves,’ who, even to this day, are distinct from fairies in their dexterity and cleverness, as every wise child knows.

But animism, as simple spiritism, fetishism, perhaps ancestor-worship, and polytheism, with the polydaemonism that may be called chrematheism, exists from the beginning of the religious history, undisturbed by the proximity of theism, pantheism, or atheism; exactly as to-day in the Occident, beside theism and atheism, exist spiritism and fetishism (with their inherent magic), and even ancestor-worship, as implied by the reputed after-effect of parental curses.