When the ancestors of the Hellenic race came from Asia, they must have brought with them a nature-worship, akin to that which subsequently appeared in India in the earliest hymns of the Vedas.  Comparative Philology, as we have before seen, has established the rule, that whatever words are common to all the seven Indo-European families must have been used in Central Asia before their dispersion.  From this rule Pictet[220] has inferred that the original Aryan tribes all worshipped the Heaven, the Earth, Sun, Fire, Water, and Wind.  The ancestors of the Greeks must have brought with them into Hellas the worship of some of these elementary deities.  And we find at least two of them, Heaven and Earth, represented in Hesiod’s first class of the oldest deities.  Water is there in the form of Pontus, the Sea, and the other Uranids have the same elementary character.

The oldest hymns in the Vedas mark the second development of the Aryan deities in India.  The chief gods of this period are Indra, Varuna, Agni, Savitri, Soma.  Indra is the god of the air, directing the storm, the lightning, the clouds, the rain; Varuna is the all-embracing circle of the heavens, earth, and sea; Savitri or Surja is the Sun, King of Day, also called Mitra; Agni is Fire; and Soma is the sacred fermented juice of the moon-plant, often indeed the moon itself.

As in India, so in Greece, there was a second development of gods.  They correspond in this, that the powers of nature began, in both cases, to assume a more distinct personality.  Moreover, Indra, the god of the atmosphere, he who wields the lightning, the thunderer, the god of storms and rain, was the chief god in the Vedic period.  So also in Greece, the chief god in this second period was Zeus.  He also was the god of the atmosphere, the thunderer, the wielder of lightning.  In the name “Zeus” is a reminiscence of Asia.  Literally it means “the god,” and so was not at first a proper name.  Its root is the Sanskrit Div, meaning “to shine.”  Hence the word Deva, God, in the Vedic Hymns, from which comes [Greek:  Theos] and [Greek:  Dis, Dios] in Greek, Deus in Latin. [Greek:  Zeus Pater] in Greek is Jupiter in Latin, coming from the Sanskrit Djaus-piter. Our English words “divine,” “divinity,” go back for their origin to the same Sanskrit root, Div.  So marvellously do the wrecks of old beliefs come drifting down the stream of time, borne up in those frail canoes which men call words.  In how many senses, higher and lower, is it true that “in the beginning was the Word.”

This most ancient deity, god of storms, ruler of the atmosphere, favorite divinity of the Aryan race in all its branches, became Indra when he reached India, Jupiter when he arrived in Italy, Zeus when in Epirus he became the chief god of the Pelasgi, and was worshipped at that most ancient oracular temple of all Greece, Dodona.  To him in the Iliad (XVI. 235) does Achilles pray, saying:  “O King Jove, Dodonean, Pelasgian,