sworth or Tennyson--chariots, bows,
quivers, axes, drums, sacrificial vessels and similar objects. They
never assume any individual character; they are simply mentioned as
useful or precious, it may be as sacred."(2)

(1) La Religion Vedique, vol. i. p. 123. "Le culte est assimilable dans
une certaine mesure aux incantations, aux pratiques magiques."

(2) Hibbert Lectures, p. 198.

When the existence of fetish "herbs" is denied by Mr. Max Muller, he
does not, of course, forget Soma, that divine juice. It is also to be
noted that in modern India, as Mr. Max Muller himself observes, Sir
Alfred Lyall finds that "the husbandman prays to his plough and the
fisher to his net," these objects being, at present, fetishes. In
opposition to Mr. Max Muller, Barth avers that the same kind of
fetishism which flourishes to-day flourishes in the Rig-Veda.
"Mountains, rivers, springs, trees, herbs are invoked as so many powers.
The beasts which live with man--the horse, the cow, the dog, the bird
and the animals which imperil his existence--receive a cult of praise
and prayer. Among the instruments of ritual, some objects are more
than things consecrated--they are divinities; and the war-chariot, the
weapons of defence and offence, the plough, are the objects not only
of benedictions but of prayers."(1) These absolute contradictions on
matters of fact add, of course, to the difficulty of understanding the
early Indo-Aryan religion. One authority says that the Vedic people were
fetish-worshippers; another authority denies it.

(1) Barth, Les Religions de l'Inde, p. 7, with the Vedic texts.

Were the Rishis ancestor-worshippers? Barth has no doubt whatever that
they were. In the pitris or fathers he recognises ancestral spirits, now
"companions of the gods, and gods themselves. At their head appear the
earliest celebrants of the sacrifice, Atharvan, the Angiras, the Kavis
(the pitris, par excellence) equals of the greatest gods, spirits who,
BY DINT OF SACRIFICE, drew forth the world from chaos, gave birth to the
sun and lighted the stars,"--cosmical feats which, as we have seen,
are sometimes attributed by the lower races to their idealised mythic
ancestors, the "old, old ones" of Australians and Ovahereroes.

A few examples of invocations of the ancestral spirits may not be out
of place.(1) "May the Fathers protect me in my invocation of the gods."
Here is a curious case, especially when we remember how the wolf, in
the No