They insult every one as they approach, but they find some other way of getting in than by passing through the gate, for the express purpose of being morally able to make the king fight with them after they have entered his city.  And they cite the rule ‘according to law,’ which is that one may enter his foe’s house by a-dv[=a]ra, ‘not by door,’ but his friend’s house only ‘by door.’  As they have not entered ‘by door’ they say they may refuse the hospitality which the king urges them to accept, and so they kill him (ii. 21. 14, 53).  Stepping in through the door seems, therefore, to be a tacit agreement that one will not injure the resident.[29]

In the epic, again, fetishism is found.  The student of the ’science of war,’ in order to obtain his teacher’s knowledge when the latter is away, makes a clay image of the preceptor and worships this clay idol, practicing arms before it (i. 132. 33).  Here too is embalmed the belief that man’s life may be bound up with that of some inanimate thing, and the man perishes with the destruction of his psychic prototype (iii. 135).  The old ordeals of fire and water are recognized.  “Fire does not burn the house of good men.”  “If (as this man asserts) he is Varuna’s son, then let him enter water and let us see if he will drown” (iii. 134. 27 ff.).  A human sacrifice is performed (iii. 127); although the priest who performs it is cast into hell (ib. 128).[30] The teaching in regard to hells is about the same with that already explained in connection with the law-books, but the more definite physical interpretation of hell as a hole in the ground (garta, just as in the Rig Veda) is retained.  Agastya sees his ancestors ‘in a hole,’ which they call ‘a hell’ (n[=i]ray[=a]).  This is evidently the hell known to the law-punsters and epic (i. 74. 39) as puttra, ‘the put hell’ from which the son (putra) delivers (tra).  For these ancestors are in the ‘hole’ because Agastya, their descendant, has not done his duty and begotten sons (i. 45. 13; iii. 96. 15); one son being ‘no son’ according to law and epic (i. 100. 68), and all the merit of sacrifice being equal to only one-sixteenth of that obtained by having a son.  The teaching, again, in regard to the Fathers themselves (the Manes), while not differing materially from the older view, offers novelties which show how little the absorption-theory had taken hold of the religious consciousness.  The very fact that the son is still considered to be as necessary as ever (that he may offer food to his ancestors) shows that the believer, whatever his professed faith, expects to depend for bliss hereafter upon his post mortem meals, as much as did his fathers upon theirs.  In the matter of the burial of the dead, one finds, what is antique, that although according to the formal law only infants are buried, and adults are burned, yet was burial known, as in the Vedic age.  And the still older exposure of the body, after the Iranian