owever, no little difficulty
in the supposition that one community has actually borrowed its
religious system from a neighbor; the general probability is that each
followed its own line.

+743+. Nor is it probable that the rejection of the old divine names by
the Persians was the result of hostility toward their Indian neighbors.
It is doubtless a curious fact that the Indian name for 'evil spirit,'
_asura_, is in Persian the name of a good spirit, Ahura, while the
Indian _diva_, the general term for a god, is in Persian the designation
of a wicked spirit, _daeva_. The Persian employment of _daeva_ for 'evil
spirit' may be explained as a protest not against Indian gods, but
against the deities of their own land; so the Hebrew prophets or their
editors apply opprobrious names, "no-god" and other terms, to deities
regarded by them as inadequate. The abstractions of the Mazdean system
have been referred to above. They seem to have been resorted to from a
feeling of profound disgust at the worship of some class of people.
Unfortunately we have not the historical data that might make the
situation clear. In the Gathas the people of Ahura Mazda are suffering
from the incursions of predatory tribes, and the greater part of the
appeals to the deity are for protection for the herds against their
enemies. We thus have a suggestion of a struggle, political and
religious, between the more civilized Aryans and the savage Tataric
tribes around them.

+744+. In the later period of Mazdeanism the old titles of supreme deity
were succeeded (though not displaced) by the terms "Boundless Time" and
"Boundless Space," the latter doubtless suggested by the vault of
heaven. These generalizations, however, had little influence on the
development of the theological side of the religion, which has continued
to regard Ahura Mazda and Angro Mainyu as the two heads of the world and
the determiners of human life. The rituals of the Mazdean and Hindu
faiths were influenced by the ethical developments of the two, becoming
simpler and more humane with the advance toward elevated conceptions of
God and man.

+745+. In view of such facts as are known it may be surmised that the
Mazdean system originated with an Aryan agricultural tribe or body of
tribes dwelling near the Caspian Sea, in contact with hostile nomads.
These Aryans, we may assume, had the ordinary early apparatus of spirits
and nature deities (gods of the sun, water, etc.), but, at the sa